Can we talk about colourblind casting...

[CurlewKate]

...without the thread descending into a woke/anti-woke stramash?

Obviously it's a great advance that black actors now have access to many more parts than they did- and obviously in most cases it makes absolutely no difference to the play, show, whatever. But I was watching Shardlake,and it struck me that it was impossible that the Abbot of a 16th century monastery in rural England would be black. And that casting black actors in positions of power and influence might well give viewers a completely unrealistic idea of the status of black people in British history, and actually gloss over their struggles. So stylised historical figures, as in Shakespeare where we all know there's an element of fantasy (I recently saw a colourblind Coriolanus that was brilliant),no issue at all, of course. But historical dramas that are trying to represent life in the past roughly as it was-maybe actually unhelpful?

Incidentally, I know that one of the main characters in the Shardlake books is black. But he has a detailed backstory, and the discrimination he faced is part of his life.

She wasnt

The ancestor that has been claimed to give her, her black ancestry, isnt definitely her ancestor at, but even if that is the person people are claiming is her 'black' ancestor, he was described as a moor (in around 1230) and at that time, the word moor meant someone who was Islamic, not necessarily black.

He was around 500 years before she was born.

She wasnt black, doesnt have black ancestry any more than I do with black ancestors around 250 years ago!

From being described as a Moor. The Moors were Islamic.

What I didn't really get about the Bridgerton casting was that it was explained as Charlotte being black & therefore black people in society.

Why not just black actors playing parts?

Why explain it?

If that was the case then it wasn't colourblind casting was it?

So are you saying my rough numbers were right?

@soupyspoon

This is true and Chinese actors

How do you know "society" wants to see more black actors? What's your evidence?

I've actually never thought about that despite knowing full well Jesus isn't white but of course do we know the son of God actually exists? There is evidence of that time a man named Jesus existed but was he the son of God the foundations of a new religion etc etc is unproven to a degree

What I was actually talking about were people in recent history that we have actual photos of like JFK Queen Elizabeth etc people we know for sure what colour they were

I would rather see more of their history as opposed to my own

Jesus was Jewish and probably Olive skinned and dark haired. He was descended from Isaac and part of the tribe of Judah

@BunnyLake There are much less opportunities and less representation for black people in the film industry and anything done to improve that and make black people equally likely to obtain work based on talent is something to be applauded.

Islamic is not an ethnicity. Moor refers to a dark skinned North African. History always tries to downplay black history.

We will have to agree to disagree.

If a black man drives a bus in Scotland but @MorrisZapp doesn’t see them do they really exist?

No, it doesn't. In English, "Moor" means any Muslim inhabitant of the Islamic caliphates of Iberia and North Africa. Cf. "Mudejar/Morisco" in Spanish.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors

100% this. ^

I have mixed feelings about this. If the film is quite stylised then it works. Theatre works. TV /film - maybe if it was a very famous character who has been "done" lots of times before , it might work with a good actor. Winston Churchill, for example, has been played by Albert Finney, Robert Hardy, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall amongst a host of others. All the right age and build, or made up to look so, with the "props", the mannerisms and above all, the voice.
If you had a black, thickset slightly jowly actor the right age, with the hat, glasses, cane, bowtie and cigar, and he could stand and move like Churchill and do the voice- the pitch, tone, accent, cadence and word choice- and really get into the character that's probably enough "Churchill signifiers" for the average UK audience member's brain to suspend disbelief and recognise "this is Churchill", especially if some of the other main historical (white) characters were played by black actors. If he was played by a slender young white woman with long dark hair and a West Cork accent, it wouldn't work.

If he and the whole film were played completely straight- by the usual stocky white man, with perfect period detail of environment, clothes and music and no anachronisms BUT the scenes in Parliament had dozens of black or Asian MPs and 40% of all the backbench MPs were female - that would just be a big fat historical lie.

Similarly, if you set a drama in modern day rural Northern Ireland and the main character walked into the local livestock mart and 50% of the farmers, dealers and auctioneers were female, it would immediately be a load of unbelievable bollocks. If 50% were female and quite a few were black it would be double unbelievable bollocks. Unless it was a surreal stylised drama with a weird dream sequence and everyone in the mart was wearing ballgowns, pearls, long silk gloves and immaculate makeup and spoke with elegant accents or something. Then your brain could click into "OK we are doing weird let's just go with it".

Would a non-white actor actually want to play Churchill, though? He hardly kept his extremely racist, vile opinions secret - and he always tends to be lionised and held up as a great hero (albeit with some minor flaws).

Nor his misogyny for that matter, but I can't see them selecting an actress to play him anytime soon.

Absolutely. It would have been far preferable if Churchill had stood aside and given Chamberlain and the other Hitler appeasing politicians free reign. Genocide is,of course,awfu,l but a differing opinion is unconscionable.

I saw Tony Jayawardena pay Churchill in Nye at National Theatre - he was great in the role - didn't cross my mind until someone mentioned Churchill here.

"Would a non-white actor actually want to play Churchill."
I don't know. Bruno Ganz played the most notorious baddest baddie of them all in Downfall - his performance was brilliant. If he Jewish, might he have played the role anyway? Oddly, that is a role that could possibly work with a black or disabled (considering he had a tremor anyway) actor once your brain got past the dissonance. The claustrophobic bunker scenes and the character study of a tyrant's power over his country and his mind falling apart was more like a theatre play than a film.

Yes, it is. However, an Elizabethan audience would not expect to see Henry V played by a black man - they knew HV was English and the same colour as them. But I think one can transfer WS into other societies e.g. Macbeth would work well if set in Medieval India.
However, the salient point with WS is that he does include black characters as well as Jewish characters - and their colour is always mentioned. For example, our attitude to Portia in The Merchant of Venice is to be interpreted through her reaction to the Ethiopian suitor - she will not marry anyone of his colour. Shakespeare does not put that in idly, he is telling us something about Portia and that she changes her attitude during the play, ending by begging for mercy on the outcast, Shylock. (Not sure she ever realise she is married for her money though!)
NB Having boys playing female parts was a peculiarity of England in the sixteenth century.

I knew that the casting was gender and colour blind when I booked. I didn't know that that would make the story unintelligible!

Churchill was of his time and his attitudes were mild compared with some contemporaries. We can only judge people by the morals of their time, not our morals (that's moral anachronism). Please don't bring up the Bengal famine. Churchill sent rice from Australia to relieve it. It was the stupid governor who played down the crisis caused by three bad harvests made impossible to cope with by the Japanese invasion of Burma. Local merchants also sold the grain on the black market at inflated prices most could not afford. Churchill neither authorised, nor agreed, nor did any of that.

Those books have no understanding of history and 'White Fragility' is racist.

NB Having boys playing female parts was a peculiarity of England in the sixteenth century.

Yes..
A few years ago we saw an all male troupe do Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew - the 'gender swapping' back to how it would have been in Shakespeare's day (albeit with more modern sensibilities) in this was more interesting than some of the swaps in those productions where it seems more like box ticking than for any genuine artistic reason.