Colour Blind casting

Their black friend told it would be OK...

The delays were due to the actors' strike.

The colour of Snow White's skin has nothing to do with the plot. Her physical description is just what happened to be seen as most beautiful at a time when the story was written. For the story to work, Snow White just needs to be beautiful, which Rachel Zegler certainly is.

Given the entire movie is named after the girls appearance, I'd suggest it probably is a reasonable deal.

Also seems the studio and show runners agree given that the entire movie has been taken back in production for extensive reshoots and rewrites based on the backlash they got from nothing more than the initial publicity.

I think if the role reflects a true historical figure and we know their race & appearance the casting should reflect that.

However if its just a work of fiction then the best actor should get the part.

So few people of colour up here? Have you got your eyes closed?!

40% of the population of Blackburn is non white, 29% off the population of Pendle, 27% of the population of Preston, and 17.5% of Burnley, for example. Nearly 10% of Lancaster.

If you live on a farm in rural Cumbria then yes, probably all your neighbours are white… but it’s ridiculous to claim that we don’t encounter non white people and therefore find tv shows jarring.

It’s like in Bridgerton. It’s not racist to admit that the Lords and Lady’s wouldn’t have been of BAME origin. It’s historically accurate 🤷‍♀️ You wouldn’t have a white Martin Luther King.

@Misthios
''I think it depends on the circumstances. Saw Moulin Rouge recently on stage and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was played by a black guy with dreadlocks and he was brilliant. The fact that the real Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a white French guy made no odds.''

Well it does matter if you understand how someone's background and appearance are an integral part of how their life story unfolded.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born in a wealthy family and had disabilities and life long health issues.

That affected his appearance and influenced his life. He turned to painting and drawing because of his poor health and was able to do that because he was from a wealthy background. He ended up painting prostitutes because other women were not attracted to him because of his appearance/disabilities.

So yes if you have an actor who is completely different physically/is not disabled and remove his real family background you are also completely removing what made him who he was as a person and what was unique about him.

Wow, you are right? My god! What about Dopey? Or the talking mirror? 😟

Could a white actor play Shaka Zulu then, given his race had no impact on his life?

Some high profile (David Baddiel, Maureen Lipman) people have been outspoken about this recently actually and I think it’s quite a hot topic in film/Tv at the moment.

The character is a representation of a real historical person and we should try to represent them close to how they were and looked. Within the show, we're not meant to think of the character as being black Gandhi, but as it's a visual media, we're still presented with a black Gandhi, while knowing that Gandhi looked very different in real life. There's a disconnect. If you don't want to make a historical show, don't make a historical show. Or, rather, there are many other historical tales you could tell, where your casting would actually fit the story, because you can have a black character in Tudor England, but not a black Henry Tudor, as he was a real person. It's making a mockery of history to 'racebend' real people.

I'm not sure what that proves, so we know that there would have been barely any non-white people outside of London and the ports, and its reasonable to assume they would have been so unusual that they would have likely been recorded in some way. Safe to say not many 16-17th century villages in the Cotswolds or Yorkshire would have had thriving communities of black people in them. 🙄

So still likely less than a tenth of 1% of the entire population. Unless you were from somewhere cosmopolitan, you likely went your entire life without ever meeting one.

Not saying that's good or bad, just stating fact.

A lot of the attitudes on here have explained to me the logic of people who got themselves worked up into a lather about a black James Bond.

Eg. JB is a handsome man, a spy, but as far as I’m aware JB is not specifically a white spy struggling terribly with his whiteness and being discriminated against for being white. So any handsome man of any colour skin could play the role. Being white is not particularly relevant or important.

(to add, I think also there is something thats been said about a woman being able to play the 007 agent number but not JB himself? I haven’t investigated enough to fully know about that and I don’t want to go off on a tangent about gender on a thread about race. JB was just an example character that sprang to mind first)

The same people say oh so a white person should be able to play Nelson Mandela/Martin Luther king/ Rosa parks, etc, and miss the point entirely that their stories depend on their race, it is relevant and important.

White people do portray people of a different race though. See my earlier post about non-Jewish actors playing key historical Jewish figures where their Jewishness should be part of the plot. And no one gives a shit.

See also Tom Cruise being cast as Jack Reacher. Reacher was portrayed in the books as 6ft 5in….,,

I don’t mind who is cast in what role, as long as their acting is believable I can look beyond historical inaccuracies.

On another note, accents, I’ve heard some of THE most dreadful Scottish accents (usually by American actors) over the years! Kathy Bates, I’m looking at you, there are more but it’s early and I’m about to make breakfast! This to me is actually FAR more distracting than skin colour!

The worst case of this most recently was the latest Snow White which has been delayed because of the controversy around it.

How can Snow White 'lips as red as rose, skin as white as snow', be played in any way convincingly by a black girl?!

Even in the book Black Tudors, the author states there were probably on a few hundred non white people in Britain at the time, out of a population of 6-7 million. I mean you can do the maths but that's not even a tenth of 1% of the population.

There were a few hundred named black Tudors that we have historic records for in London, the numbers were probably higher. Admittedly, the black Tudors would have predominantly been in London and the port cities. Just like now, London is far more ethnically diverse than, e.g. Durham (54% white, 21% asian, 14% black, 12% mixed and other vs 96% white, 2% asian, 1% mixed in 2021 census data).

Preach! It's always the Black actors, coming over here stealing all the jobs... 🤨

But I suppose what the OP is saying is that we are not sure with certain casting combos whether the casting element is meant to have significance or not. So in that scenario is the child adopted and whether that is going to play a part in the story line or whether is totally irrelevant.

I'm not sure how best to deal with it though because I definitely think best actors for the job should be the focus.

And while this is categorically NOT racism, I also agree with PPs about playing fast and loose with regional accents, especially Scottish accents and those from the North of England: it's really galling!

'Yellow face' seems to be the last acceptable bastion of racism in the arts.

I have an actor friend of Taiwanese origin: he says that to people of East Asian heritage, it is very easy to tell if somebody is Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Taiwanese/Thai/Viet etc, but it's very common in Western casting to just call for 'people of East Asian appearance' and lump them into one homogeneous mass...

This just shows that you’ve misunderstood the point of colour blind casting though. Despite many many posters on here clearly explaining it. The actor is playing the character, not a <insert race here.> version of that character

Margot Fonteyn danced Juliet in her mid 40’s, and was very successful despite being about 30 years older than the character.

This, exactly! Plus, most of us first experienced theatre when we went to see a panto, with its obviously unrealistic casting (principal boy, dame) or a school trip to see a Shakespeare play (where women normally play women, but everybody knows that female roles were once played by boys) et cetera. Plus the soprano who sings Juliette won't be 14, and may or may not have the physique du role. It's definitely about the different expectations of realism in theatre versus TV/ cinema, always depending on the genre of course. Even in theatre, there are still difficult questions, such as whether an Otello/Othello should be black or even "blacked up" in the traditional manner, if anyone still dares to do this - it would risk making nonsense of the story if he were a white man in a majority white cast, though suspension of disbelief is theoretically still possible.

I agree with pps who have said that the best way of ensuring diverse casting without promoting inaccurate ideas about POC in white societies would be to tell real or plausible stories from the past, in which POC could play actual POC without anachronism.