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Hollywood's most controversial racial miscasting

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Shocking news, 'murican producers and investors having more interest in promoting their expensive pets than being truth to history or literature.

And then you have Salmita Hayek filming a piece about Frida Frikin' Khalo... in english!!!!
 
I don't think old, old Hollywood can be blamed. American audiences back then were racist and wanted to see their white idols playing everyone.
 
Pickles Spill said:
But let's say the best/safest actor to play the part in a film isn't of that specific race. Would it be appropriate to chose them?
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Well, "best" would ostensibly be determined by the readings, but often there are cases where they director/studio already has a name in mind, are there not? In cases like that some actors and actresses are not being given a chance to prove if they're the best for the part or not.

As far as safe, that's pretty much what I was talking about. In many cases they'd rather go with name recognition/star power as an advance boost than wager on a good performance from a relative unknown. Obviously the studio wants to make as much many as they can, so it's a good business decision, and then default ability to draw trumps acting ability in that equation.
 
Labor said:
Well, "best" would ostensibly be determined by the readings, but often there are cases where they director/studio already has a name in mind, are there not? In cases like that some actors and actresses are not being given a chance to prove if they're the best for the part or not.

As far as safe, that's pretty much what I was talking about. In many cases they'd rather go with name recognition/star power as an advance boost than wager on a good performance from a relative unknown. Obviously the studio wants to make as much many as they can, so it's a good business decision, and then default ability to draw trumps acting ability in that equation.
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Alright that makes sense. Like if Studio A picks Betty White to star as an Asian in their movie without considering possible alternatives candidates, then you're eschewing people that could have been could have been as good as Betty White in that role and fit the particular race. I just feel like if I were a studio, then sometimes that train of thought would be impractical because if I had the chance to cast Al Pacino or Liz Taylor, I sure as heck would because I'm 99% guaranteed I'd get a good performance out of them. But then that kind of creates a feedback loop where the only guaranteed actors are white. I think that's why it's important to have small indie cinema on the side, which allows you to experiment with actors, to create a larger "guaranteed" actor pool.
 
They lost me at Fred Armisen playing Obama. It's a sketch comedy show, it's about who can do the best impression.
I stopped reading after that.
 
I see a lot of deserved cases on the list, but I don't know if they actually know what they expect Cleopatra, Egyptians and Persians to actually look like. In those cases, there is quite a bit of controversy and speculation. They're probably expecting Arab-looking people, but in the case of Egypt, black would possibly be more likely. As for The Love Guru, it is a Mike Meyers movie made by Mike Meyers written by Mike Meyers starring Mike Meyers. Is that miscasting instead of a comedian who is out of touch?

kingwingin said:
I thought johnny Depp was cherokee
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He claims to be Native American in any case, he isn't.

injurai said:
Nope but we has adopted into a tribe for the filming of the Movie as essentially a "pay for a blessing" sort of thing.
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Not even that, he was accepted into a family of Native Americans but he doesn't belong to the tribe because of that.

Speevy said:
No one but Pacino plays Tony Montana. You can't do that role without Pacino.
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Also funny, the original Scarface had an Italian Tony, played by an Austria-Hungarian.
 
I'm not a movie guy. The last movie I saw was mad maximum and I honestly couldn't give you a decent plot synopsis for that film (aside from: "Do yourself a favor. Watch this movie.")

With that being said, the only racial miscasting that particularly stands out to me is John Wayne as Genesis Kahn. I mean... What the fuck? Not even close. How what why? A lot of these could be attributed to "well, they kinda look like [race] so what the hell." but that one is beyond absurd to me.
 
BocoDragon said:
I do think the outrage about a Chinese person playing a Japanese person actually draws from social injustices like Asian on Asian racism/nationalism.
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It depends. If your Chinese/Japanese the casting can be genuinely jarring(miscast). I found Valkyrie really jarring as well with the number of US/UK actors. And that kind of sucks, since it's a rare, pretty cool story of German military men trying to assassinate Hitler.
I'm also 100% sure Geisha was cast based on popularity and that the people making wouldn't even know how to cast it based on anything else.
 
I don't understand the issue with the cast from 21. The fact that the real people inspiring the story were asians is in no way relevant to the plot, so I can't see any problem with the director casting whoever he wants to play their parts.

I also remember people being upset by the fact that the "foreign guy" in Short Circuit wasn't really Indian (even if he wasn't specifically meant to be, IIRC).
cowboyj.jpeg
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icarus-daedelus said:
In the original show, the different nations draw on specific and distinctive non-European cultures for their basis: the Fire Nation is Imperial Japan.
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Barely. Only the imperialist part, but Japan is hardly the only Asian people with an imperialist past. Aesthetically they are Chinese, from clothing to architecture--their capital is a straight Forbidden City clone. Their martial arts resemble Chinese Shaolin wushu. Hell, they even eat southwestern Chinese food. Fire Nation is predominantly Chinese by miles.
 
The Last Airbender is such a dumb example to bring up. It has no historical or real world basis (unlike everything in that list). While the movie reimagines the source material in such a way that "indians" effectively replace "east asians"(?), it's not an inherently racial casting. They could mix it all up where the Water, Fire, and Earth tribes had families of all colors and real world counterparts and it still wouldn't be a miscast.
 
Natalie Wood in West Side Story is so stupid. She's supposed to play a Latina. They made her tan. Okay. Whatever. Old Hollywood tradition. But then they completely dub her just-okay singing voice with someone else's. Why bother at that point?

And Fred Armisen as Barack Obama was terrible in the sense that he was just horrible at impersonating him as the episodes went on and completely lost the tone of voice and mannerisms.
 
EulaCapra said:
Natalie Wood in West Side Story is so stupid. She's supposed to play a Latina. They made her tan. Okay. Whatever. Old Hollywood tradition. But then they completely dub her just-okay singing voice with someone else's. Why bother at that point?
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They dubbed or mixed just about everyone's singing voice in musical movies, with notable exceptions until the 70s. Nobody sings on set live and the Internet wasn't a thing, so it doesn't really matter.
 
Matt said:
People brining this up always bugs me, because Gyllenhaal was actually pretty spot on casting.
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If anything people complaining about it might be more racists than the movie because they must have been thinking along the lines of Persian = Seems like a country with Arabic name! = Brown Arab People, hahaha.
 
Laughing Banana said:
If anything people complaining about it might be more racists than the movie because they must have been thinking along the lines of Persian = Seems like a country with Arabic name! = Brown Arab People, hahaha.
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Exactly. I remember an old thread on this topic and some poster suggested they should have cast Naveen Andrews.
 
I love lists like this where something current is the worst thing ever while leaving more egregious things off the list.

Like Fisher Stevens playing an Indian character in Short Circuit.
 
Bullshit list thanks to #1, Emma Stone wasn't even miscast as much as they needlessly added ethnicity to a character that was always going to be white. If Crowe would have forseen the controversy he would have sooner made the character Alison Jones than cast an Asian actress, just read into how Bill Murray was cast to know the thought process of casting in the movie.
 
Alx said:
I don't understand the issue with the cast from 21. The fact that the real people inspiring the story were asians is in no way relevant to the plot, so I can't see any problem with the director casting whoever he wants to play their parts.

I also remember people being upset by the fact that the "foreign guy" in Short Circuit wasn't really Indian (even if he wasn't specifically meant to be, IIRC).
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Lol wut. The guy painted his face brown and used a very stereotypical south asian accent.
 
it's nowhere near the most controversial miscasting, it was only a small role in a bad movie, but it was the one that bothered me the most as a kid. they replaced al simmon's best friend with a white dude in the 97' spawn movie. this bothered me so much as a kid, I just couldn't understand why they couldn't find a black actor for that role.

but of course a a kid I didn't understand that the movie was probably already "black enough" with a black protagonist and his family.
 
Not The Droid You're Looking For said:
This was pretty good casting. Also, I don't see anything controversial about it. Persians were (and many still are) white.
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I'm perpetually angry at the "brown people" grouping of much of the Middle East. Many, many Persians look about as pale as your average Mediterranean European. You could throw a stone at a crowd in Teheran and hit a couple of Jake lookalikes.
 
Funky Papa said:
I'm perpetually angry at the "brown people" grouping of much of the Middle East. Many, many Persians look about as pale as your average Mediterranean European. You could throw a stone at a crowd in Teheran and hit a couple of Jake lookalikes.
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Exactly. I've also had so many people say to me "Persian? Oh, so you're Arab". Middle East = Arab nowadays.
 
Nah people from Iran don't look anything like Jake Gyllenhaal lmao

I know they aren't Arabic but the fact of matter is they do, in fact, look different. Our genes don't label us as white or black or blue, there's a spectrum of features... and there's quite a long history of the more south easterly populations of Europe which are more similar to the Persians/Iranians, being discriminated against.

The populations in the world that descended from the majority of the rest of the European population are what most people think of as "white", and those same people are those that benefit from white privilege and replace other ethnicities in white washing. It doesn't matter if Iranians are technically white from some scientific standpoint or if they self identify as white, not in this context, no.
 
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