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.

Re 'non matching' children can I remind you that plenty of people adopt and that doesnt mean there is going to be a subplot it's just normal life.

How much worse could she have been treated ultimately her head being chopped off!

It wasn't because of her skin colour though!

🤣I'm sure that was great comfort to her. 🤣

Depends on the film, obviously a film claiming to be big budget and historically accurate is going to bug me more than a comedy and low budget stuff.

I’m white and not woke but I really like colour blind casting. Acting has a massive issue with barriers to entry.

Who cares if Queen Victoria is played by a Hispanic actress? It doesn’t take anything away from the play/TV show.

No it was just pure old misogyny.

How would you feel if Nelson Mandela was played by Liam Neeson?

See I completely disagree with the above posts about Bridgerton, I think it's clearly an alternative heightened reality (e.g. the clothing colours do not attempt to reflect the reality of textiles technology in Georgian Britain). Shondaland took a modern rumour (that Queen Charlotte was mixed race) and ran with it, it's internally consistent. It's also not colourblind casting, families are either black, white or asian. I think it's a very clever way to introduce more black characters into period dramas.

There was also a big furore about Eddie Redmain playing a transwoman, with people saying that it was taking a part away from a "real" transwoman? Where do we draw the line? Should only gay people play gay parts? Does that mean gay people can't play straight parts?

Didn't Disney also recently drop actors with dwarfism from Snow White to be politically correct? Which then meant less acting jobs for actors with dwarfism!

I think it is daft for a real life historical figure to be played by an actor that does not look as much as possible as they did and forces people to suspend disbelief.

It is like suggesting that because she is a great actor Meryl Streep would make a good Gandhi or Martin Luther King in a biopic...

Or that Marilyn Monroe could be played by Bradley Cooper to be fully inclusive.

It is just silly.

These days there would be an outcry, an rightly so, if a white actor tried to portray someone of a different race so it does not make sense that asian or black actors would be made to portrait a white historical figure or appear in period drama portraying times when they would not have been part of that society (I doubt there were many black vikings for example).

We should not try to rewrite history instead we should make sure that more contemporary parts are created by actors from all backgrounds and that there is less discrimination and sexism in the industry in general, like any workplace.

Also it is perfectly possible to focus on historical experiences from the point of view of a non white person. Steve McQueen did that with 12 years a slave.

Maybe what we need is to move away from just showing in films and TV what happened in western/predominantly white societies throughout history and have more content which focus on stories of people from other backgrounds.

You'd hate the current production of Macbeth in Leeds then @ThinWomansBrain . Really diverse cast,all absolutely phenomenal actors. Superb production, facilitated by the best actors for the roles.

It would be strange to have a white actor play Nelson Mandela.
If a drama's theme were say racial discrimination it might be a bit confusing if there were colour blind casting.

I saw Wicked Little Letters and found it distracting to begin with. Once I had worked out it was colour blind casting I could enjoy it. I kept thinking, "unmarried Irish woman living with black boyfriend? In the 1920s?? They'd be run out of town. "

Afterwords I thought, colour blind casting is like showing us utopia, where race ceases to be an issue.

@Startingagainandagain there is an issue that we seem to make historic drams that pull from very limited source material. There are a lot of stories out there that include BAME people - we had a whole empire that spanned the globe for goodness sake.

That's a fair point about Mandela specifically.

But I wouldn't expect people to be happy about a white actor playing Shaka Zulu for example, even though as far as I'm aware he never suffered any racial discrimination.

Literally jesus is portrayed by white people,that's worse than Liam neelson being Martin Luther king surely.colour blind casting has gone on forever.

I wouldn’t like it, but Liam Neeson also has many, many more opportunities to feature in historically accurate shows than our hypothetical Hispanic actress. Sometimes the ends justify the means.

Unless we’re just going to say too bad to anyone of non-white, non-male background. You’ll just have to take it on the chin that your acting career is limited as you’re just not the right colour?

I was about to say I am all for colourblind casting as I enjoy having interesting characters and performances, especially of Shakespeare, but I suppose this could be a problem and I hadn’t thought of it like that. What if casting for historical dramas (less Shakespeare as Shakespeare is always a fantasy, even when it was first written as that’s why so many plays are set in Italy) is colour-washing and gender-washing the reality of history, when women and people of colour were treated horrifically?

That reminds me of the BBC’s Father Brown, where women, people of colour and gay people are cast as allies/good guys and Father Brown on their side, when in reality the Catholic Church was one of the very systems that contributes to systemic inequality and the books were written by Chesterton to promote “good Catholic values” and very much did not support women, gay people or people of colour.

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.

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'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.

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

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.