White actor to play Hawaiian war hero

Apparently the Emma Stone lesson still hasn’t been fully learned.

The latest spark in the debate over whitewashing Asians and Pacific Islanders from film and TV came with news reported Tuesday by Deadline: A Glasgow-based writer/director and a British production company are undertaking an ambitious project — dramatizing the little-known and fraught story of the World War II Ni’ihau incident — with a white actor cast as the Hawaiian war hero who stopped a foreign takeover.

Zach McGowan will play Benehakaka “Ben” Kanahele, who was ultimately awarded the Medal for Merit and the Purple Heart by President Franklin Roosevelt for his actions on the island of Ni’ihau. In 1941, a Japanese World War II pilot crash landed on the sparsely populated Hawaiian island after the Pearl Harbor attack, where he was aided by a few islanders of Japanese ancestry. The locals ultimately prevailed; Kanahele and his wife Ella, initially taken as hostages, killed the pilot. Historians have debated the role the incident played in the lead-up to Japanese-American internment during WWII.

News of McGowan’s casting was immediately met with backlash on social media among those frustrated with seeing white actors cast for roles they feel should be played by Asians and Pacific Islanders. It’s the same kind of outcry that bubbled up when Stone played the part Native Hawaiian, part Chinese character Allison Ng in “Aloha” — a casting choice director Cameron Crowe ended up apologizing for. Or when Scarlett Johansson played the lead in “Ghost in the Shell.” Or Matt Damon starred in “The Great Wall.”

While some past whitewashing controversies involved fictional stories with roles that presumably could have been written for white stars, “Ni’ihau” is based on real events.