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.

There's a series called "The Chosen" where he is accurately portrayed as a middle eastern man. The Bible actually says he wasn't good-looking! It's a great series actually and available for free. It's a dramatisation of the book of Acts. https://watch.thechosen.tv/

Peoples acting careers are limited in all sorts of ways though. How many acting gigs do you think overweight, unattractive actors get Vs good looking ones?

Acting is a business, like sports, and it is inherently unfair. You know that when you get into it. 🤷‍♂️

Unless you propose enforcing some kind of acting communism where all are equal and everyone gets the same chances. And if you do want to do that, I have to ask you, who is going to pay for it?

What about age blind casting.

Why shouldn't we have a 65 year old Juliet?

@yarhara Huh? Moulin Rouge is made up but also it is historically accurate that there would have been black or mixed entertainers and courtesans in fin de siecle Paris

Josephine Baker was a legendary dancer at the Folies Bergere in 1920s Paris.

So why did you start the post with 'I'm not racist but...' then?

It’s slightly annoying but I can’t really get worked up about it.

I’ve actually read a book called Black Tudors (great read by the way) which details quite a few black people (but different nationalities and cultures) who lived and worked in England during that time and had respected jobs, one was a musician in the court of Henry VIII. Some of them were left bequests in their masters wills if they were servants which set them up for life. The more you find out about historical evidence, there’s more of a chance you’ll find evidence of different races existing and living lives with white people so then why shouldn’t they be depicted in historical films and tv programmes?

This. It’s always such selective outrage.

@Finlesswonder That does happen. Ian McKellen played Hamlet recently

I think it depends on the circumstances. Saw Moulin Rouge recently on stage and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was played by a black guy with dreadlocks and he was brilliant. The fact that the real Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a white French guy made no odds. Similarly when Harry Potter and The Cursed Child opened in the West End, the role of Hermione was played by a black actor and everyone said how great she was.

However if the play/movie is about a family it's jarring when you have two black actors playing the parents and two white kids as their biological offspring, or vice versa.

Meryl Streep But seriously, how old is Donna supposed to be? Again, making the assumption she graduated from university when she was in her mid-20s, 20 years later she would have been in her mid-40s. We understand Meryl Streep is a stunning goddess, but she was nearly 60 when she filmed the first film.

@JaninaDuszejko Bridgerton has confused me a little after the last series. For the first two, I understood the colourblind casting, and I thought that the idea was that in this alternative reality, racism did not, and had never existed.

However, in the last one, there was the whole plot about racism and not being accepted, so I'm not sure how to interpret the show now and whether I'm meant to expect an undercurrent of racism.

I think this is the point at which everyone needs to remember it’s made up. Historical dramas/period dramas are just Eastenders in funny clothes essentially- they bare no more claim to real life, so no one should be taking their history lessons from them.

The point of a film about Nelson Mandela would be the experience of black people, and therefore it’s reasonable for the actors to be black. It’s common sense. The point of count whatever his name is in Bridgeton is to shag everything in sight while looking beautiful- so any reasonably attractive bloke will do.

Eh, I'm not sure what you are getting at here?

Every part of England has been 'almost' exclusively white for nearly all of recorded history until just before Windrush.

Even in the book Black Tudors, the author states there were probably on a few hundred non white people in Britain at the time, out of a population of 6-7 million. I mean you can do the maths but that's not even a tenth of 1% of the population.

Prior to Tudor times it would have been even more stark.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that it's a fact. 🤷‍♂️

I agree re northern accents, I haven't watched Coronation Street for a while but they certainly play fast and loose with what a person from Manchester sounds like, heavy Yorkshire and Lancashire accents all over the show I know I'm being a pedant but it used to bug the hell out of me.
I'm all for colour blind casting but it does throw up some questions that can't really be avoided, on some occasions the audience has to be colour blind and on other occasions it really matters they aren't say for example in Cush Jumbos recent drama Criminal Record.

I agree re northern accents, I haven't watched Coronation Street for a while but they certainly play fast and loose with what a person from Manchester sounds like

It's even worse with Scottish shows. So many glaswegians playing born and bred Shetlanders on the BBC series and similar.

You need to learn to do colour blind viewing and analyse less.
You wouldn't complain about a Shakespeare production that had female actors on the grounds that in Shakespeare's day they would have been male, would you?
Verisimilitude should have its limits.

It's been normal on stage for a long time. Are we going to exclude the best singers from lead roles in Opera? Or the best actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company? As PP have said, we're very into our costume drama (low budget, big dresses - what's not to like?). Ethnic minorities have been very involved in directing, writing, producing, filming them. Why not in front of the camera? What's a bit annoying is when they try to shoehorn in a storyline just to have a more diverse cast and it's not very well written. That can be jarring.

'Skin colour in the wrong place...' is distracting? You really didn't need to write anything after that

Out of curiosity where is it acceptable for it to be? The local takeaway? Dealing drugs in some dark and dodgy 🤨

I thought the rural North West including towns like Burnley were keen to show that they had changed. 🤔

Bye Nick

This, exactly! Plus, most of us first experienced theatre when we went to see a panto, with its obviously unrealistic casting (principal boy, dame) or a school trip to see a Shakespeare play (where women normally play women, but everybody knows that female roles were once played by boys) et cetera. Plus the soprano who sings Juliette won't be 14, and may or may not have the physique du role. It's definitely about the different expectations of realism in theatre versus TV/ cinema, always depending on the genre of course. Even in theatre, there are still difficult questions, such as whether an Otello/Othello should be black or even "blacked up" in the traditional manner, if anyone still dares to do this - it would risk making nonsense of the story if he were a white man in a majority white cast, though suspension of disbelief is theoretically still possible.

I agree with pps who have said that the best way of ensuring diverse casting without promoting inaccurate ideas about POC in white societies would be to tell real or plausible stories from the past, in which POC could play actual POC without anachronism.

Margot Fonteyn danced Juliet in her mid 40’s, and was very successful despite being about 30 years older than the character.

This just shows that you’ve misunderstood the point of colour blind casting though. Despite many many posters on here clearly explaining it. The actor is playing the character, not a <insert race here.> version of that character

'Yellow face' seems to be the last acceptable bastion of racism in the arts.

I have an actor friend of Taiwanese origin: he says that to people of East Asian heritage, it is very easy to tell if somebody is Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Taiwanese/Thai/Viet etc, but it's very common in Western casting to just call for 'people of East Asian appearance' and lump them into one homogeneous mass...

And while this is categorically NOT racism, I also agree with PPs about playing fast and loose with regional accents, especially Scottish accents and those from the North of England: it's really galling!

But I suppose what the OP is saying is that we are not sure with certain casting combos whether the casting element is meant to have significance or not. So in that scenario is the child adopted and whether that is going to play a part in the story line or whether is totally irrelevant.

I'm not sure how best to deal with it though because I definitely think best actors for the job should be the focus.