Colour Blind casting

[ThinWomansBrain]

I know any statement that starts "I'm not racist but..." is usually exactly that, but I find colour blind casting in period drama really distracting.
I've seen two films and a play in the last week where it's been really off - why go to all of the effort of period costume and make up, and then have really implausible actors?

Wicked little letters - first Asian police woman was 1970s. not 1920s
National Theatre production - 1930s play - white couple with an inexplicably Asian Child
Catherine Booth (co founder of Salvation Army) was not black

It's particularly jarring when they are supposed to be portraying real characters.

In contrast, I saw some contemporary dance/theatre this evening, I don't even race or gender of most of the dancers.

I don't love it. I don't watch eg Bridgerton anyway so it's not my demographic, but I've noticed a tendency to have black, often female, actors in positions of authority in contemporary drama.

There was a fabulous crime drama/dark comedy set in urban Scotland a few years ago. It had three black characters, two of whom were in senior police roles. This was so jarring to me (an urban Scot) that I actually googled the ethnic make up of the Scottish police force and found as expected that the police in Scotland are overwhelmingly white (population is 92% white) and that police from ethnic minorities were Asian, not black.

Our First Minister is the son of first generation immigrants from Pakistan, and the leader of the Labour Party up here is the son of a Pakistani and UK politician.

Scotland is diverse, we have a long history of successfully integrating immigrant populations from far and wide. What we don't have is any demographically significant black population - of course lots of black people live in Scotland, but they're a small fraction of the non white population.

I don't grudge any actor a job, or any writer full rein over how they imagine their characters. But if you present black characters in high ranking police roles in a country with a tiny proportion of black citizens, it will jar.

Yeah, I agree. This is my problem with historical dramas where all the “good” characters are okay with someone being gay, too. That’s not how history was, and it feels offensive to marginalized people to just paint over their history like that. (I’m not a person of color either, but I’m bisexual and I’ve studied a lot of gay and bi history since the early 2000s.)

My complex thoughts on colorblind casting:

It works better in theater than on film, because theater is inherently less realistic.

Historical figures should be played by actors who more or less resemble them. Ethnicity or nationality doesn’t bother me so much - for example, the late Selena was Mexican-American and Jennifer Lopez is Puerto Rican, but Jennifer Lopez was right for the part because she bore some resemblance to Selena and can sing.

Fictional historical characters can be minority ethnicities if that can be done plausibly. Someone mentioned a stage version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” where the Pevensies were black. That, to me, seems plausible, because there would have been black families in London in WWII who could have evacuated their children. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)

However, I do think that in some cases, Hollywood adapts fiction or remakes movies and makes white characters non-white because they’re too lazy to make anything new for people of color. For example, I would have rather seen Disney use their time, money and talent to make a new black princess voiced by Halle Bailey than to put Halle Bailey in the live-action Little Mermaid movie.

Parents and children can be played by members of different races, if it doesn’t significantly alter the story for the audience to assume that the children are adopted.

yes but as a counter-example house of the dragon made the Velaryons black, when they weren't in the books. GRRM has said that on reflection he could have made the Targaryens black - both make/would make sense even within an medieval europe-equivalent because they are essentially immigrants from Valyria.

There are loads of ways that non-white actors can be included in period dramas. Either by just doing a different type of period drama, (great! we actually get something outside the usual tudors/victorian/ww1 scope) - e.g. anything focussing on the romans, films like Dido, etc.

Or focus on non-european history - black and asian empires were around for thousands of years, there are so many stories to tell that aren't UK/US-centric.

Or some sort of central conceit to explain why its differing from 'accuracy' - i.e. as in Bridgerton where the fact that Queen Charlotte is black and how that's influenced wider society is part of the show. Or as a pp has given the example of Heathcliff where he could conceivably have been black/mixed ethnicity, and fits in with the character being an outsider.

Or even with something like Bridgerton or Reign, or the Great when they make very clear that they aren't aiming for historical accuracy, and it's an fantastical interpretation of history, by using 21st century music or clothes.

Any of the above are great.

But if you are making a straightforward historical drama which is otherwise aiming at being generally accurate to the period, and particularly if you're basing it on real people then yeah I do think its inappropriate to change their race and pretend it wouldn't have any impact on their character or the way they interacted and were treated by society, and is actually a disservice to the people who lived through those times.

Black women often seem to be used as shorthand for diversity. If you look at ads on TV you'll usually see the former but you'll never see an Asian man

That's interesting about Jolson, I thought he played a "minstrel" in the black face tradition, I didn't realise he played different races. He was a trailblazer for Jewish artists though and The Jazz Singer was also important as the first "talkie"

I do remember John Wayne as Genghis Khan, that was a painful watch. Yul Brynner I guess that was The King and I, Laurence Olivier Othello, I haven't seen Mickey Rooney, Angelina Jolie or Kathryn Hepburn in those parts, not sure what the films were. The ones I remember haven't aged well.

I always thought an interesting one was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness with Curt Jurgens playing Lin Nan. So here we have a German Austrian playing a Chinese Dutch army officer and Robert Donat as the Mandarin, not to mention Ingrid Bergman, tall Swedish woman, playing Gladys Aylward an English woman known as The Little Woman. There was some interesting casting in that film but it was certainly a story worthy of a film being made.

YABU

period dramas are fictional

I actually think the Velaryons are a great example. They are consistent and it works really well in the context of the story.

This was really the point I meant to make. I'd really like to see more black historical drama. There are plenty of examples even in US history of well-to-do black societies, not to mention lots of African history. Maybe not so well known, but that makes it all the more interesting.

We also shouldn't forget that the % of black people in the UK is really quite small - nowhere near the number we see on TV.

You say "special treatment" others say "equal opportunities". And everyone deserves equal opportunities.

And we can see it is equal opportunities, not special treatment, by - for example - looking at how POC are underrepresented as Best Actor/Actress winners.

It's similar to how people talk about women in leadership positions or CEOs in the workplace. Do women get "special treatment" by having a women's leadership course? How about widening participation in universities aimed at working class kids? I don't know you're political POV, so maybe you're against stuff like this too. This is somewhat away from the topic of colour-blind casting, but I see it as all the same stuff. Solutions to societal issues of inequality.

Do women get "special treatment" by having a women's leadership course

Women make up 51% of society though?

Let’s keep excluding people so the next generation know that we used to exclude people 🤣🤣🤣

The thing that irritates me is when a play or film is set in a small community in the past where everyone is born and bred there, and there was little travel or contact with the wider world, but there are a myriad of different accents.

I think that where an actual historical character is portrayed, it is better to match the actor's and the character's ethnicity.

However, if it's a fictional character then get the best actor for the job regardless.

No so bothered about gender, given that Fiona Shaw was the best Richard II i ever saw.

Is your argument about representation (e.g., women make up 51% of society, so should make up 51% of leadership positions) or group size (e.g., women make up 51% of society, there are lots of us, our voices must be heard)?

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.

I think most people's arguments are that there is nothing stopping playwrights and writers producing new high quality stories which feature diverse casts however most of the issues being talked about here are things like making The Little Mermaid or Snow White black, or putting loads of non-white people into 17th century English period dramas. 🙄

No issues with diverse casting until it co-opts existing intellectual property in a lazy and unrealistic way or tries to reinvent history in a way that many find at best jarring, at worst offensive. I think the Egyptian government were so offended when people tried to recast Cleopatra as black that they threatened to sue. 🤷‍♂️

The point about opportunities being limited for black actors ignores the fact that there are less black actors than white actors so there will be less roles. Modern day dramas seem to have a higher proportion of non-white actors than in the population generally which would even things out. My point is this argument is irrelevant.
If we show period drama and historical dramas with non-white actors there are many people who will believe that this reflected society of the time - many view things superficially. The same would true for casting a female in a position of power role in the 19th century as it simply did not happen.
If we are talking about sci-fi or futuristic works anything goes, whereas modern drama again is down to the writer/director

Feels less about the casting and more about the writing then, as people have also given examples of when the writing of existing stories (e.g., Agatha Christie) was adapted in a way to support the casting?

Love colour-blind casting, do it more.
Hate lazy writing, do it less.

Instead of funding another Snow White, fund a well-crafted story with a diverse character set.
Before funding a period drama set in Britain, fund a period drama set in China.

Would you agree?

Representation is really important.. how can the next generation see themselves as something, when they don’t have any examples.

The more diversity the better

I think you need to realise that the current representation of minority groups on TV in the UK is already way above their % demographic in our society. How much representation is needed exactly?

If you go to Kenya you don't see many locals beating themselves up that all their adverts and TV shows feature almost 100% black Africans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.