Dylan Mulvaney cast as Anne Boleyn

[dementedpixie]

Came up on fb and thought it was satire to start with! Would put me off going to see it tbh

Yeah I’ve also heard this was coming for a long time (not this actor specifically but trying to find a trans actor to play one of the queens)

I’m unfortunately not surprised.

Not the film (didn't know there was a film), it was the stage show a few years ago

It's so childish isn't it. No thought beyond "We'll cast a trans, that'll show 'em!"

The video of Dylan outside the theatre has him walking so exaggerated and infuriates me.

The film is a film of the stage show. I saw it at the cinema

No, that's Catherine Howard - who comes to a realisation of her own abuse during her story. (She was groomed as a child by her tutor, for which she was blamed, that being the 'understanding' at the time).

I've seen it. I also know my Tudor history and Six was basically accurate about the women's lives and what Henry VIII (who was a tyrant) did to them. None of them got out unscathed, even if they survived. Anne of Cleves did best, manipulating Henry so that she got independence and a life of her own.
Not that I am going to discuss Tudor history as this isn't the point of the thread. The point of the thread is that a narcissistic, creepy man is going to portray a woman who was strong in many ways and who was destroyed. That is an insult.

If I remember correctly, Hamilton cast a black man as the protagonist despite this being historically inaccurate and also missing the entire point.

He. Mulvaney is a man. Wasn't Hamilton the one where a well-known historical figure was played by someone of the wrong ethnicity? Historical accuracy does not have to be maintained at all times but sometimes it matters. E.g. if I was going to tell the story of Rixhard III with all black actors, I would move the setting to somewhere that would fit, not jam it in to 15th century England. And that would work well.

Hamilton is an interesting one.

On the one hand, it's kind of uncomfortable watching black men play white men who undoubtably benefitted directly or indirectly from the slave economy. In reality we know no actual black man would have the opportunity to get anywhere near their social, political or economic level.

On the other, it's great to have a huge hit show with great roles for black actors. There is undeniable power in seeing an almost entirely black cast play people of social, political or economic power, and it recontextualises that while these people were of the social elite, their success was not a done deal and they were also politically at least outsiders trying to change an established order.

Applying this to SIX - I think an all male cast could work, with an interesting tension between the social construction of male power and agency and the constraints these women lived under. However but given that the underlying power difference runs the other way, I'm not sure it would be possible to escape a sense of watching men punching down / Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid.

But that is casting a male cast for the deliberate effect. Like Hamilton, where retelling the story with a black cast is supposed to change it and raise new questions and perspectives, the point of casting men as the queens would be because they are not women. We would be supposed to notice and talk about that.

What I think does not work, and cannot work, is casting one male trans "woman" under the conceit that this male person is an actual woman and therefore someone that could in another time have been Anne Boleyn. We are not supposed to notice this crucial difference between him and Anne, or consider the underlying power differences, or how Dylan's "womanhood" would have played out in Tudor Britain vs that of actual women. All the perspectives that might make a male actor an interesting interpretation for the role are vorboten, unsayable.

Which is why it's not going to work. Because it's motivated by ego not the needs of the play.

No, in SIX, Anne Boleyn was portrayed as the ditzy, silly and immature one.

Actually, the first two actors to play the role of Hamilton were Latin- American, and it was very much “the point”. Lin Manuel Miranda deliberately cast non- white actors as non- white leading parts were and still are traditionally hard to come by. The non- white actors generally played revolutionaries while white actors represent the old world, and Hamilton is himself an immigrant, something LMM has experience of himself as his parents are immigrants from PR. Not to mention the music throughout is rap and r and b based, reflecting the authors experience growing up in mainly black and Hispanic Washington Heights.

And if I recall correctly, black and Hispanic Americans have not systematically oppressed white Americans.

Hamilton isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s sophisticated and was groundbreaking in a way Six could only try to imitate (and try it did).

*I don’t like the term non- white, but it best captures what I’m trying to say.

Is she? I've seen it and didn't get that impression. And she wasn't, of course.

From a European pov Hispanics are not non-white, they are Spanish. Only the US has these peculiar 'race' divisions.

It’s an American play, you’re being obtuse. The founder fathers didn’t engage in rap battles either.

My point is that the casting in Hamilton was an artistic decision to make a political point, the casting of DM is a cheap stunt casting to revive a flagging box office. In fact, since we are supposed to believe DM is a woman like any other, it’s pretty basic casting.

Actually I think it is a casting to make a political point. It's just making a point in favour of men in a play supposed to centre women is kind of sexist, and the dissonance breaks the play.

Made up or not, the bottom line is because he has this role a woman doesn't.

You will have to explain the political point. I'm European.
I agree about Mulvaney, who is a creepy male. How dare he play a female role, and one from my country's history, to boot (who I bet he knows zilch about).

Black men have exercised huge power in most parts of Africa. Though I agree with your point one has to stop being America-centric. The Kings of Bugunda and Dahomey etc exercised just as much power in their domains as any European king. They also slaved and the economies of their countries was based on slavery and had been for several centuries before ever European set foot in Africa i.e. they fed the Arab slave trade to the north and the Arab slave trade out of Zanzibar, both of which had existed since the conquest of North Africa by Islamic Arabs leading jihad out of Arabia in the 8th century AD (or BCE if you like, they are the same thing, and both Christian terms).

Yeah fair enough and a good point. I'd like to know a lot more about African history. In fact, you've just helped my decide what my next big audio book will be. But in the context of a US musical for the US market, the US cultural language around race is the relevant one.

Says who? There is no obligation of any kind to cast anyone. This sort of position makes the GC movement look transphobic and unhinged. I would not want to see production with DM in it, but if others would why shouldn’t they?

Grow up and stop trying to stir.

Do you think the TRAs reaction to Eddie Redmayne in the Danish Girl was similarly 'unhinged'?

Says the fact that he’s got this role and not a woman

Because if they were capable of critical thinking they wouldn’t want to ?