Colour Blind casting

I really enjoyed 'Bridgerton'.

I thought Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte, Adjoa Andoh as Lady Agatha Danbury and Rege-Jean Page as Simon Bassett were all fantastic in their roles.

I never thought that they should not be playing these particular characters.

And @WithACatLikeTread.

It doesn't work and must be stopped! I find it outrageous.

There has been colour blind casting in the theatre for years, it's just become the fashion in cinema and TV so more people are being exposed to it. I think there are positives and negatives.

Firstly, as some people have already said, it can mean the past sometimes appears less racist than it actually was.

Secondly, the reality is that there have been black people in Britain for millennia. So why cast a black actress as Anne Boleyn in yet another drama about Henry VIII and his wives? Why not make a totally new and more realistic story about the thousands of black people we knew were in Tudor London, including e.g. named black musicians in Henry VIII court. Or a drama about one of the powerful black royalfamilies in Africa at the time (to be fair, I think these kind of stories are now being told in the US and in some African countries)? And why is it that Woman in White has been on TV so many times yet Armadale (also written by Wilkie Collins) which has a mixed race lead character has never been dramatised?

On the other hand, done well, deliberately changing the race of a character can make you think more about the character's motivations. And clearly it's beneficial to have more options for black and asian actors

I totally get what you mean.🙄Accuracy is everything. It really pisses me off when I see period dramas where you have actors from working class backgrounds playing the middle/ upper classes and royalty. It's also deeply offensive to show women having agency because that just not how it was.

Well done for starting this thread, I am always grateful when people like you, IMO, show their true colours. Its good to be able to put a name to the mindset.

They could be in period dramas. Black people still existed and there were even black people in Britain. But we know that specific people were not black. Anne Boleyn wasn't black. Do we need another production about the Tudors, especially the same tale of Henry VIII's various marriages, rather than a story of Mary I's fight for the throne or Kett's rebellion? If the aim is for greater diversity of casting, why not also a greater diversity of story?

I don't want an Indian Catherine the Great or a black Mao Zedong. I suppose 'Thermae Romae' has Japanese Ancient Romans, but then it's a Japanese production only and they're all Japanese, not this individual basis.

I agree. It doesn't work. It just feels like a point is being made.

But white people play people of colour all the time and no one notices/cares

Ghost in the Shell : Scarle Johansson
The last Samurai: Tom Cruise
Exodus God's and Kings: Christian Bale

There's a whole article about it here...

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/26-times-white-actors-played-people-of-color-and-no-one-really-gave-a-sht_n_56cf57e2e4b0bf0dab313ffc

I watched a film recently having read the book first. The lead character in the book was an icy blonde yet in the film she was dark haired and different body type. That was annoying.

Stop focusing on the colour of skin &pay attention to what really matters

I don’t have a problem with it, unless they’re misrepresenting an actual historical person. I think Netflix was sued for casting a non-Greek person as Cleopatra?

Yes. They must have been furious about Jesus being depicted with blue eyes by Robert Powell...

This doesnt bother me. Would you want actors from an ethnic minority to not have many acting opportunities because they were the wrong colour? I wouldn't.

Some things it's fine. I loved Hamilton and Bridgerton but there was an explanation for all the colour blind casting. Hamilton, although based on historical facts, is a musical so you do suspend some level of accuracy as no one sings and dances through life and Bridgerton, is just fantasy in a way, an exploration of what it could have been like if Ethnic minorities were accepted as equals right from the start.

But it does annoy me in films and tv where it's supposed to be a dramatic representation in a specific time and place.
I wouldn't like to see Asians and Black characters represented by different races. It's just confusing if there are suddenly ethnic minority in an everyday role when it just wasn't normal.
A film about the British in India or South Africa during apartheid would be a total mess with colour blind casting.

Goodness you must have been horrified for decades by virtually every drama that inaccurately depicted every part of England as exclusively white over every historical period. I’ll just have a look for all the threads you started on being distracted by that total lack of accuracy………

Oh.

I went to see Les Mis at Southampton when they were touring. The child playing the young version of Cosette was white. The woman playing the adult version of Cosette half an hour later was black. It was really strange.

I've just thought of last Christmas' Agatha Christie. That was a great way to have a Black lead, in a historical setting, properly contextualised. Incidentally, the lead actor, David Johnson, is not a fan of colour blind casting

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/david-jonsson-murder-is-easy-bbc-b2466425.html

I saw a production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at Christmas where all the Pevenseys were Black. It made absolutely no difference to the story.

However, my issue with colour blind casting in some circumstances (mainly history based shows) is that it potentially leads people to ignore/forget about/be unaware of historical race based oppression.

There should be more historical shows about people from an ethnic minority background created. Harlots showed how to do great job showing how Black people lived in London in Georgian times.

Doesn’t bother me in the slightest.. as long as the actor is good, and portrays the character well, so what.

Art and Artistic Licence, I doubt there is any historical film or biopic, that doesn’t distort names, characters, and dates, to create a more compelling story. These aren’t documentaries people are producing.

Do you feel the same about hair colour?

I totally agree with you!! But I also get annoyed at Eastenders and Coronation street because in 2024 there should be more ethnic actors in these shows.

Well it's preferable to a 'whites only' casting call isn't it? I agree with an earlier poster, an actor is playing the truth of a character, not a skin colour. Performance is about emotion and imagination, not historical reenactment, and there are very few roles where skin colour is relevant. Plus, if you think about the number of dramas and plays set before the 1950s that are produced and performed in this country, there would be very little work for minority ethnic actors without colour-blind casting.

Wow, the comments tone has switched.

Sods law.

And sad.

There's a very very long history of white women playing the role of non-white characters and often in ways that belittle the history of those characters. E.G. Audrey Hepburn played a native American by putting some paint on her forehead.

So when you say white women wouldn't be allowed to play those roles I can only assume you mean it's considered taboo now because they were fairly shocking in the past.

I don't see the hypocrisy to be honest.

I’m British but of Chinese heritage. To be honest it is irritating, because it is not a reflection of the time at all. I watched a drama set in Yorkshire in the 1700’s a few days ago and it had various black and asian characters working as weavers in the middle of nowhere. Now having a drama set in London at that time you may have seen the occasional ethnic minority but have them in the roles they really would have been in.

I would like to see more drama based on fact so a decent WWI film depicting the Commonwealth soldiers from India and the hardships they faced.

I think when people say they are colour blind it’s a bit of white guilt if I am honest. No one asks to be born in to their race or country.

Yet a white actress would not be allowed to play the role of a black or Asian character. Why the hypocrisy?