Introducing: The Racialicious Casting Couch

February 6th, 2013 by Racialicious Team

Infinitely Polar Bear, a J.J. Abrams production, stars Zoe Saldana and Mark Ruffalo as a married couple, so I’m already interested. I’d have nothing bad to say about this, if it weren’t for the breakdowns for Amelia and Faith, meant to be the daughters of Saldana and Ruffalo’s union. Dominican (Saldana) + Italian (Ruffalo) = potentially Middle Eastern? What they’re looking for is obvious: a pair of brown children who can pass as the children of this particular mixed-race couple. It’s about color for this casting, not background. But I find myself incensed that we’re still playing this game where brown is brown is brown.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem like the biggest of deals, but our willingness to accept the casting of anyone with a tan as a

generic ethnic/exotic look is what got us Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl (A Mighty Heart), Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin (Iron Man 3), and Janina Gavankar as Luna Garza (True Blood). People of color aren’t as interchangeable as Hollywood would like us to believe, but Infinitely Polar Bear‘s casting calls prove that that belief has yet to successfully challenged.

Beck reminds us that this systematic problem in casting doesn’t boil down to the idea that all directors, producers, and casting directors are evil racists that need to be stopped. Yeah, something needs to be stopped, but it goes beyond shaking up the people making decisions. We need to shake up our school of thought. We need to stop finding excuses and loopholes for monochromatic casting, even if that means that I crawl through breakdowns every day with the sole purpose of publicly shaming those who deserve it. We need to stop defaulting to white.

 

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Posted in asian, asian-american, casting, diversity, everyday racism, hollywood, inequality, privilege, race & representations, theatre | 1 comment

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  • QueerJock2

    Well said. And the thing about the Mandarin bothers me especially. Because they decided to cast a Non-Chinese actor because they didn’t want to alienate Chinese audiences or the Chinese financial backers for the movie. But then go cast a half-Indian actor instead.
    Maybe if your character is so offensive that you have to shift him to another POC group to avoid offending one, you should just not use him period?