'It's dangerous not to see race': is colour-blind casting all it's cracked up to be?
“After I left drama school, I never thought that I would be in a period drama,” says Rosalind Eleazar. “There’s a misconception that people of colour didn’t exist in those times.” But, much to her surprise, in the five years since she graduated from Lamda, the actor has now appeared in four costume dramas, including the TV series, Harlots, about sex workers in 18th-century London, and Armando Iannucci’s Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield.
When she landed an audition for the role of Agnes, Copperfield’s friend and confidante, Eleazar didn’t believe it. “I thought, ‘Yeah right, as if this role would go to someone that looks like me’,” she says, having seen many actors of colour cast as maids, servants, and other largely non-speaking roles in period dramas. “Whilst there is nothing wrong in playing a maid, their stories on the whole never develop. But Agnes is ‘the girl the boy ends up with’ – and a full character who is integral to the development of the story. That sort of part usually goes to a white woman.”
But Copperfield was cast colourblind – a practice whereby race isn’t specified or overtly considered during the casting process. It’s an approach that has become increasingly common in theatre, TV and cinema, particularly in the past couple of decades, opening up opportunities on the screen and stage from Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy to Will Gluck’s Annie.
However, colour-blind casting isn’t without its critics. Opponents – whether viewers, commentators or directors themselves – have often claimed that casting people of colour in stories from the past compromises historical accuracy. “I think you must produce something that is believable,” Julian Fellowes told entertainment newspaper the Stage in 2017. The Downton Abbey creator was defending the lack of diversity in his adaptation of Half a Sixpence by pointing out that there would not have been many black people in Folkestone in 1900. This argument around “history” has also been extended to new adaptations of old favourites, with a social media backlash to the idea of characters such as Ariel from The Little Mermaid or James Bond being portrayed by black actors, rather than white ones.
Eleazar says she recently met up with a director who levelled a similar criticism at Copperfield. “He said he just didn’t ‘believe’ the film because of the way it was cast, that it was ‘a tick-box exercise’.” It’s a sentiment she wholly disagrees with. “Most films, TV shows or plays are about things like the human condition and suffering. If that is the base level, then why on earth are we so reticent to cast people that have a different skin colour? Some stories require casting based on race, like a Martin Luther King biopic … Others like Copperfield simply don’t. It is a story about the privileged and the poor and the wealth between them. And, most importantly, it’s fictional.”
In theory, anyone who supports better representation on screen should support colour-blind casting. But there have been instances where its use has failed those it should supposedly uplift – for example, when the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People cast its three main actors of colour as antiheroes. On the casting oversight, Maz Do wrote for gal-dem: “It takes a lot of blindness and a whole lot of gall … Representation does not mean indiscriminately casting people of colour into whatever subsidiary roles are available … True representation involves a lot of self-interrogation: why write this character, why write this story?”
For this reason, Diep Tran, an arts journalist specialising in diversity and the ethics of representation, says that anti-racists have reason to be sceptical of the “colour-blind” approach. “Colourblind casting is dangerous in the same way the phrase: ‘I don’t see race’ is dangerous,” says Tran. “It negates the very real structural hindrances that block actors of colour from the same opportunities as white actors – like low pay in the theatre industry, a lack of roles that are ethnically specific that actors of colour can play, and unconscious bias on the part of white theatres and casting directors.”
Although “only talent matters” is a catchy mantra, Tran says this approach does not eradicate stereotyping – which may well have played a role in the casting oversights of Normal People. “A lot of people think that Shakespeare is synonymous with ‘white’, and will never think of actors of colour as the leads in those plays. There’s still bias that informs what people think of when they think of ‘leading men or women’ or who looks like a ‘villain’.”
As a result, a growing number of anti-racist critics such as Tran prefer the practice of “colour conscious” casting – which actively acknowledges and considers race when casting “non-traditionally”, rather than attempting to ignore it. This could look like lots of different things: from searching for actors from specific ethnic backgrounds, to using race to inject a novel message, to tweaking aspects of the production to acknowledge how race impacts the characters’ lives.
“Colour consciousness tells directors, producers and casting directors to make diversity part of their consideration when casting,” Tran says. “It asks them to make sure they see a wide spectrum of people, not just the people who happen to make it into the room.” Logistically, this might mean holding extra auditions, or putting in extra time to find someone whose ethnic background enhances the story. “For The Baby-Sitters Club reboot on Netflix, the producers intentionally wanted Japanese, English-speaking actors for the role of Claudia Kishi and her family. It probably would have been easier for them to search more broadly for English-speaking Asian [actors], but they wanted the authenticity and input from [Japanese] voices.” This approach isn’t always simple, Tran says, but neither is addressing the entrenched structural racism in television, film and theatre.
The Talawa theatre company, a black British theatre company that often reinterprets classic plays with all-black casts, is similarly intentional in the way it incorporates race into a narrative. “Colour-conscious casting has enabled us to read stories in nontraditional ways and ask questions of society today,” a spokesperson says. They point to their 1991 production of Antony and Cleopatra, which saw Doña Croll take to the stage as Britain’s first black Cleopatra. “She had no intention of playing the role as it had traditionally been played – sexy and yielding; hers was instead a fiery, powerful queen, a ruler who knew her mind. And so that production became a comment on how history had erased the story of a powerful, brilliant and commanding black queen fighting against colonial oppression by every means at her disposal.”
The company’s 2016 production of King Lear, starring Don Warrington, was also enhanced by the addition of a racial lens: “In casting the play – a story about actions speaking louder than words – as we did, and against the backdrop of Brexit and the Windrush scandal, we encouraged audiences to think more broadly about how divisions were being created, and at whose expense,” the spokesperson says. In this way, they say, being conscious of actors’ races brings something new and exciting to stories that have been told time and again.
The distinction between “colour blindness” and “colour consciousness” is not always clear cut, or universally agreed upon (Talawa does not have a firm preference for either term, despite its approach to race and casting being highly intentional). Nonetheless, the most contentious examples do appear to expose that they are quite different ideologies. “Historically, there are cases where colour-blind casting has been used to cast white people as characters of colour, because they were seemingly ‘the best person for the job’,” Tran says. “You can see it with the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi, a Japanese woman turned cyborg, in the 2017 film Ghost in the Shell. In 1990, the Broadway production of Miss Saigon was shut down briefly because white actor Jonathan Pryce was cast as a half Asian-half white character. The producers said his talent was what mattered. In doing so, colour-blind casting was used to promote white supremacy, and take away opportunities for actors of colour.”
Tran also points out that “colourblind” approaches can remove key messages from stories that are explicitly about race. “Works featuring characters of colour are usually about how those people of colour live in the world. If you cast white people in Fences, the entire message of the play – which is about blackness in America – is lost.” She also points to Hamilton, whose director described the show’s casting as “essential” to subverting the history of America that is usually told. “Directors, creators need to ask themselves, what is this work really saying? And how does casting this person of colour enhance or change what the work is saying?”
In television, film and theatre, ethnic minorities are represented better than ever, which is something that most actors and directors of colour feel should be celebrated. While the conversation around casting processes might sound like hair-splitting, it does seem important to interrogate the results they produce – particularly in TV, where there is a significant discrepancy between representation behind the camera and representation in front of it.
While an approach that says: “I don’t see colour” is becoming more of an industry standard, it appears there is an alternative, compelling case that we must continue to see it.