Colour Blind casting

'Skin colour in the wrong place...' is distracting? You really didn't need to write anything after that

Out of curiosity where is it acceptable for it to be? The local takeaway? Dealing drugs in some dark and dodgy 🤨

I thought the rural North West including towns like Burnley were keen to show that they had changed. 🤔

Bye Nick

It's been normal on stage for a long time. Are we going to exclude the best singers from lead roles in Opera? Or the best actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company? As PP have said, we're very into our costume drama (low budget, big dresses - what's not to like?). Ethnic minorities have been very involved in directing, writing, producing, filming them. Why not in front of the camera? What's a bit annoying is when they try to shoehorn in a storyline just to have a more diverse cast and it's not very well written. That can be jarring.

You need to learn to do colour blind viewing and analyse less.
You wouldn't complain about a Shakespeare production that had female actors on the grounds that in Shakespeare's day they would have been male, would you?
Verisimilitude should have its limits.

I agree re northern accents, I haven't watched Coronation Street for a while but they certainly play fast and loose with what a person from Manchester sounds like

It's even worse with Scottish shows. So many glaswegians playing born and bred Shetlanders on the BBC series and similar.

I agree re northern accents, I haven't watched Coronation Street for a while but they certainly play fast and loose with what a person from Manchester sounds like, heavy Yorkshire and Lancashire accents all over the show I know I'm being a pedant but it used to bug the hell out of me.
I'm all for colour blind casting but it does throw up some questions that can't really be avoided, on some occasions the audience has to be colour blind and on other occasions it really matters they aren't say for example in Cush Jumbos recent drama Criminal Record.

Eh, I'm not sure what you are getting at here?

Every part of England has been 'almost' exclusively white for nearly all of recorded history until just before Windrush.

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.

Prior to Tudor times it would have been even more stark.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that it's a fact. 🤷‍♂️

I think this is the point at which everyone needs to remember it’s made up. Historical dramas/period dramas are just Eastenders in funny clothes essentially- they bare no more claim to real life, so no one should be taking their history lessons from them.

The point of a film about Nelson Mandela would be the experience of black people, and therefore it’s reasonable for the actors to be black. It’s common sense. The point of count whatever his name is in Bridgeton is to shag everything in sight while looking beautiful- so any reasonably attractive bloke will do.

@JaninaDuszejko Bridgerton has confused me a little after the last series. For the first two, I understood the colourblind casting, and I thought that the idea was that in this alternative reality, racism did not, and had never existed.

However, in the last one, there was the whole plot about racism and not being accepted, so I'm not sure how to interpret the show now and whether I'm meant to expect an undercurrent of racism.

Meryl Streep But seriously, how old is Donna supposed to be? Again, making the assumption she graduated from university when she was in her mid-20s, 20 years later she would have been in her mid-40s. We understand Meryl Streep is a stunning goddess, but she was nearly 60 when she filmed the first film.

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. Similarly when Harry Potter and The Cursed Child opened in the West End, the role of Hermione was played by a black actor and everyone said how great she was.

However if the play/movie is about a family it's jarring when you have two black actors playing the parents and two white kids as their biological offspring, or vice versa.

@Finlesswonder That does happen. Ian McKellen played Hamlet recently

This. It’s always such selective outrage.

It’s slightly annoying but I can’t really get worked up about it.

I’ve actually read a book called Black Tudors (great read by the way) which details quite a few black people (but different nationalities and cultures) who lived and worked in England during that time and had respected jobs, one was a musician in the court of Henry VIII. Some of them were left bequests in their masters wills if they were servants which set them up for life. The more you find out about historical evidence, there’s more of a chance you’ll find evidence of different races existing and living lives with white people so then why shouldn’t they be depicted in historical films and tv programmes?

So why did you start the post with 'I'm not racist but...' then?

@yarhara Huh? Moulin Rouge is made up but also it is historically accurate that there would have been black or mixed entertainers and courtesans in fin de siecle Paris

Josephine Baker was a legendary dancer at the Folies Bergere in 1920s Paris.

What about age blind casting.

Why shouldn't we have a 65 year old Juliet?

Peoples acting careers are limited in all sorts of ways though. How many acting gigs do you think overweight, unattractive actors get Vs good looking ones?

Acting is a business, like sports, and it is inherently unfair. You know that when you get into it. 🤷‍♂️

Unless you propose enforcing some kind of acting communism where all are equal and everyone gets the same chances. And if you do want to do that, I have to ask you, who is going to pay for it?

There's a series called "The Chosen" where he is accurately portrayed as a middle eastern man. The Bible actually says he wasn't good-looking! It's a great series actually and available for free. It's a dramatisation of the book of Acts. https://watch.thechosen.tv/

I completely agree with the OP. I can't suspend my disbelief when there are non- white actors in period roles (in colour blind casting). Other things also irritate me like inaccurate accents (the North is not a homogeneous mass) or blue eyed parents having a brown eyed child etc etc. I also think it's white washing history to an extent; presenting a world where racial issues have never existed. I like the PP's suggestion of more period pieces from the perspective of a POC rather than colour blind casting.

I can't say i've ever found it distracting.

No it doesn't work for me and neither does gender blind casting.

I don't want to watch Lord Byron played by a woman.

Because he was a man.

I've found this when we went to see Lilian rouge in London and satine the fair skinned ginger main character was a dark haired mixed race lady who was very talented but just didn't fit in the story line and I felt it made the whole thing a bit crap.

For me it just depends on the style of the production - Shakespeare, musicals, opera, (in fact most theatre), and a lot of films are already departing from reality in so many other ways (shakespearean language, bursting into song, dream sequences etc) that it makes no difference who is cast. We're already suspending our disbelief.
In a production aiming to present gritty social realism, or priding itself on historical accuracy, colour blind casting would jar a bit. But I reckon that's a minority of work (although predominantly TV).

I think stage plays are a different case tbh. It's been widely accepted for years that actors on stage don't need to look like who they play, especially Shakespeare. (I mean men used to play women for starters)

Thats very different from a TV production or film with all of the expectation of realism that you get in a much bigger production like that.