Amidst the whitewashing of past and current cinema, seeing a person of colour on our screens is refreshing. Yet, from makeup to putting on accents, the film industry still goes to great lengths to avoid employing actors of colour in the 21st century; because why bother casting a black actress when you can settle for Angelina Jolie with a perm?
It’s not hard to spot a film that has disregarded a character’s melanin level when picking the actor to play them. Disney’s The Lone Ranger stars not Native American Johnny Depp as Tonto of the Comanche tribe. Despite the producers having a cultural adviser on hand, the mere casting is problematic; there’s just something not quite right about white America first seizing the Native Americans’ land and livelihood, then going on to commandeer their representation in film also. Although the performance was respectful, ┬áan actor who uses the common defence of┬á ‘but Acenstry.com suggests I’m 1/24th Cherokee, maybe!!’ and mispronounces native words isn’t the authentic portrayal most had in mind. Other, perhaps more damaging examples of misguided casting have been not black Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, not Korean Jim Sturgess in Cloud Atlas and not Iranian Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia (wherein actor and actual Prince of the Persian Zand Dynasty David K. Zandi was passed up for the role). Sure, big stars fill cinema seats, but gluing racist eyelid prosthetics onto a white man instead of casting a popular Asian actor is surely taking the piss.
Sometimes it just takes context to reveal how problematic a portrayal is. Emma Stone in Aloha plays a quarter Hawaiian quarter Chinese character. I suppose it’s not so bad at first glance – an actress of this specific mixed race would be hard to find; but the issue goes beyond this. This film, set in Hawaii, has an entirely white cast. Incidentally, white people only make up a minority of about 25 percent there. Yet, on this rare occasion that a Hollywood film spotlights the beauty of the Hawaiian islands, it does not do the same for its people; there are no Polynesian or Pacific Island actors – just a slightly tanned Emma Stone. It’s all feeling a little Out of Africa here.
Even when films do include actors of colour, Hollywood is often still unable to find their chill. Avatar: The Last Airbender, for instance, features white actors as the protagonists (Asian or Native American in the Nickelodeon cartoon of which the film is based on) yet the antagonist is played by brown actor Dev Patel. I can’t decide which is more offensive, this casting choice or the quality of the film. In fairness, some films have had a good go at subverting such racial bias. In Iron Man 3 the racist caricature of Asian villain The Mandarin from the comic book series is in the film portrayed as a white man from Miami pretending to be a foreign threat to America. This is a clever commentary on the way society often practices Orientalism, connoting foreignness with evilness by way of not being Western and familiar, and worked well in diffusing the racist design of the original character.
Some argue that certain roles are given to particular actors based on their merit and star status however this can’t be so when there is an abundance of talented actors of colour continually overlooked. And others reason that a little extra bronzer simply makes the race of the character more apparent. In actual fact this only reiterates harmful and frankly outdated stereotypes. Although increasingly more subtle and infrequent, problematic portrayals still exist; and if you need proof of its damaging effect, then just walk down Greyfriars Road on Halloween night. Count how many blackface costumes you see in the queues for clubs and you’ll feel a distinctly spooky chill down your spine. No, that’s not the ghostly October air; that’s the feeling of wild disappointment.