Chromatic Casting: Remixing The Dark Knight Rises
By Arturo R. García
At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to revisit Friday’s post about Bane, Chromatic Comics-style. Keep in mind that there’s several different permutations of the casting choices I came up with.
Let me say up-front that this, ultimately, is an exercise in casting for fun. It is not intended to suggest that casts comprised entirely of people of color are “THE ANSWER.” To suggest that one must choose between calling for more POCs to be cast in race-neutral roles, or calling for the creation and development of more standout characters of color – be they heroic, villainous or otherwise – is to enable a false dichotomy. There’s good reasons why Luke Cage is best played by a Black actor and why Bruce Wayne could be played by, say, an Asian-American actor. (He’s not in this particular version, but I’m not saying an Asian-American actor or actress couldn’t pull it off, and if you’ve got any choices of your own, please feel free to chime in in the comments.)
If anything, the Chromatic meme puts the lie to the premise that “there’s not enough [x] actors to make it work” or “people wouldn’t go see an [x] actor in a general-market lead role.” Showing that there are actors of color out there, each of them with established fan bases, who could step into these “iconic” roles only supports the call for a greater variety of roles for them, and for the next wave of POC actors, because it shows that there are “enough” of them out there for both consumers and business interests to take a chance on.
With that established, here we go. A ton of pics, and some spoilers for Nolan’s Batman series are under the cut.
Batman/Bruce Wayne: Nestor Carbonell
Yeah, it’s sort of a cheat right off the bat, since Carbonell has already played Gotham City’s mayor in the Nolanverse. But, he’s come close enough to playing BW on Psych, where he livened up this past season as charming “filthy rich” do-gooder detective Declan Rand. Between playing Rand and his stint as Batmanuel in the dearly-departed live-action version of The Tick, Carbonell has done just about everything one can do except don the actual cape and cowl.
Commissioner James Gordon: Courtney B. Vance
Another case of the actor basically playing this role in another arena: even as FlashForward couldn’t stop tripping over its’ own creative intentions, Vance got to define Stan Wedeck as the heart – and more often than not, the common sense – of his charmingly misguided FBI team.
Alfred Pennyworth: Ben Kingsley
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