Colour Blind casting

GiggleHoot
Because we are living in a dystopian nightmare, foretold in 1984. We’re learning to shut our mouths but one day the tide will turn.

I can only hope!!

These are the novels, if anyone's interested.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/315544-malabar-house

Well then your prejudice has made you miss a gem of a film.

"Minority actors/actresses need to have more high-profile roles available to them."

totally agree. I'm currently reading a series of 4 novels by Vaseem Khan about the first female police officer in Mumbai set in the period just after Partition. They are not only v enjoyable, but they portray the role of women in that period as well as the fallout from Independence and WWII. They would make a fantastic TV series, and would provide lots of parts for both Asian and white actors. This is the kind of thing I'd like to see more of.

Happy with my conclusions, also happy to change them when information comes along to suggest that I should. You can write as eloquently as you like about how some views (yours and the other posters you mentioned) on this thread have been misunderstood. You can't polish a turd, is my view.

@ColonelDax well no, as I said made up elf shit. But seeing as dwarves aren't real why are you so certain they shouldn't be black?

I saw the trailer for Wicked Little Letters and when I saw the blatant 'Woke' casting like the Asian police woman - I just didn't want to see the film after that and I feel a lot of people feel the same. And having a different race child from the parents with no explanation makes me sigh 'Not Again'...

I am generally fine with it- programmes like Bridgerton are not based on reality so I like the fact that there is a diverse cast.

I did go and see Frozen and a little black girl was playing young anna And then grown up white Anna appeared which did confuse my daughter a bit at first because they looked so different. Both little Anna and older anna were fantastic actors. They just looked nothing alike

I'm guessing youre not a fan, so I'll hold off on taking your opinion tbh. 🙄

And I think this is where you have you mistaken me and others on this thread.

Nobody is saying people shouldn't be allowed to cast like that. Just that it's usually not a great idea.

As I said about Rings of Power. It was absolutely slated when it came out and is seen as one of the biggest bombs of streaming TV history. There are a number of reasons for that (bad writing, unlikable characters) but the frankly bizarre casting decisions that led to nearly every scene being jarring and incongruous in the extreme.

So by all means cast any TV show or movie any way you like, I hope you make some money, I just don't think you will and I certainly wouldn't do it if I were a screenwriter.

That's not so black people 'know their place' as you put it earlier.

By all means let's create more opportunities for everyone, there are plenty of stories to be told. Like I said, one of the weirdest things about Rings of Power is that there actually is plenty of opportunity to have really good, consistent roles for non-white people in the original Tolkien manuscripts in a way that would have made sense and added much needed depth to the stories.

Instead the show runners bizzarly decided to just go colour blind and throw in a few black dwarfs and hobbits. 🙄

Lunacy, box office suicide and actually a really lazy and borderline condescending way of ticking a 'diversity' box without actually having to make any effort to support your non-white actors or set them up for success.

I mean the Lord of The Rings is made up elf shit. They can cast whatever colour people they like in any role

To an extent yes. That is why it is called art, and why acting is a craft. It is supposed to evolve, a bit like humans are supposed to. If your imagination stops when you sees skin colour...

So what if it was written a hundred years ago and based on folklore? It's fiction.

As soon as I watched Wicked Little Letters I knew there would be a thread. FWIW I thought Anjana Vasan was absolutely brilliant and her eye rolls were hilarious.

It was sarcasm. The view that only black actors 'benefit' from these guilty, weak attempts to level up is ridiculous.

I think it's the right statistic. The awards are a proxy for the quality of the roles.

Your argument is similar to saying: we don't want to look at the % of women CEOs, we just need to look at the % of the whole workforce who are women.

There aren't enough high quality lead roles for POC. It's getting better, but we aren't there yet. The best roles tend to be written for white people, the evidence for this is the winners of Best Actor and Actress.

Very similar to how women at work tend to be in lower paid roles, even though we might make up 50% of the workforce. We're underrepresented at the highest levels.

Is colour-blind casting a perfect solution? No. But I support it because it's an effective way of increasing acting opportunities for POC, which is an important issue to me. Why shouldn't an artist screenwriter be able to say about their own art and creation: "allow everyone to audition for this role". I support this choice for screenwriters, producers etc.

Eh? Are you seriously comparing Tolkienesque literature written a hundred years ago and based on early Saxon, Scandinavian and Germanic folklore, to a modern multicultural Carribbean society? And saying because the modern version exists, we should be able to represent any society we like composed in any way? 🤷‍♂️

Have you seen the latest Shogun series that's just dropped? A story of feudal Japan. Do you think it would be reasonable to cast black people and native Americans in it because those kind of mixed societies exist nowadays? If not why not?

And you think I'm talking in bad faith?

*you essentially want Black actors to know

Take back what?

You said

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

When it was pointed out that a black haired albino would be able to fit the criteria you pivoted to 'lighter skinned...'.

You are arguing for a position which denies Black actors roles that it would be reasonable for them act well in because you can only see a certain type of white person in it. You essentially what black actors to no they have no business in those roles. If that isn't know your place I don't know what is.

You said a bit more, IMO, disingenuous, goady shit and finished up by slating the latest Lord of the Rings adaptation for it's lazy tick boxing.

'Lenny Henry as a hobbit, in the same small tribe as a south east Asian looking hobbit for example...'.

Have you been to the Caribbean? In Jamaica there are there are White Jamaicans, Jewish Jamaicans and South East Asian Jamaicans along with Black people who descend from a whole host of different African countries. (You do know that Africa is not one country, don't you?). The motto of the island is 'Out of Many One People' based on its multicultural roots. This multicultural mixing pot of a population is evident across the Caribbean.

There is good faith on this thread but I haven't seen you demonstrate it.

Maybe when it comes to period drama and similar adaptations Hollywood & Co should move away from European history or more specific Victorian England backgrounds.

Take a look at stories that naturally feature non white characters. There must be 1000's of stories out there that are worthy of our attention and could be easily told through film. (Like it was done with King Richard or Black Cake)

Instead we get yet another film about Napoleon, or the 3 Marketeers... and dare I say it, isn't it time for another Robin Hood?

I think as an industry, there is a real luck of imagination and a desperate clinging to the old ways. Colour blind casting is lazy and unimaginative. A real shame on an industry that is supposed to be creative.
Runt over.

But where will colour blind, age bling, sex blind, sexual attractiveness blind etc casting lead to? Bloody awful shows that nobody wants to see I imagine.

Absolutely, and were vilified and abused just because of their colour, which this 'colour blind' casting ignores, and can make the past seem a lot less racist than it actually was

What also frustrates me is the assumption that the British demograph is the same as USA, it doesn't even make sense. So yes it bugs me to see a British drama with about one third of the characters black but no one of Indian / Pakistan origin, for example. I'm in Ireland and every ad has at least one black person despite there being around 2% of the population but we never see people of Eastern European origin despite that being by far the largest immigrant group. My local shopping centre had a big billboard recently showing a woman wearing a particular ethnic style and I swear I have never in 20 years in this city seen anyone who looks or dresses like her. It's just silly tokenism.

Re: Angelina Jolie: She played Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, in the movie “A Mighty Heart.” That’s because Mariane Pearl personally chose Angelina Jolie to play her, even though Angelina Jolie is white and Mariane Pearl is (quoting Wikipedia here) the multiracial daughter of an Afro-Chinese-Cuban mother and a Dutch Jewish father.

People of colour are both the global majority (large group size) and underrepresented in high quality leading acting roles (e.g., by percentage of Best Actor/Actress roles) in terms of within-country percentage: for example 13% of Americans are black but 13% of Best Acress winners are not Black

These are not the right figures to be using.
If 13% of Americans are black, then its reasonable to expect that 13% of all actors are black.
It is not reasonable to expect that 13% of award winners be black.

I think we agree.

Thinking about my Rings of Power example from earlier. There were plenty of opportunities in Tolkien's writing for entire groups of non-white actors to be cast sympathetically as easterlings in that show (who could even have easily been the tragic heroes of the entire story).

Instead the writers chose to simply Ctrl C, Ctrl V black and Asian actors into random roles with no rhyme or reason. It wasnt the only reason why that show failed by any means but it contributed to making the whole thing drivel from episode 1.