Casting director whitewashing in Hollywood
LOS ANGELES: The casting director originally wanted to be an actor, but when he recognised a need for local talent to appear in Hollywood films, he changed course and launched an “Asiancy.”
Now, working on projects for the likes of Netflix and Marvel, Ko Iwagami is doing his part in the fight against the casting controversy.
“You have to step up and make something cool,” was how he put it.
This summer’s ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ may be the watershed moment for actors of Asian descent. If ‘Black Panther’’s US$1.3 billion global box office and ‘Moonlight’’s trio of Oscars have nailed the lie that a black cast can’t carry a film, then Jon M. Chu’s romantic comedy has the potential to do the same for Asian actors. In fact, this would be an even greater leap forward for a group, who — despite the whitewashing controversies — has remained conspicuous by their absence from lead roles in major Hollywood productions.
Iwagami has been on a mission to increase screen time for Asian actors with his Tokyo-based Kaiju Inc. agency. Iwagami acknowledges progress has been made but contends that lazy caricatures still abound in most movies.
“There are stages: nonspeaking roles, then stereotypical roles, then I’m sure there is a next step where Asian people are written as actual humans,” said Iwagami.
Spending childhood weekends at his grandmother’s house just north of Tokyo, Iwagami says he was captivated by filmmaking while watching his uncle’s huge collection of imported movies. “I would ask myself, ‘How do they do that?’” he recalled. “I decided then I wanted to be an actor.”
The only Asian face
His heart set on working in Hollywood, Iwagami persuaded his parents to send him to high school in the US. At Santa Fe University of Art and Design in New Mexico, he found himself frequently in front of the camera in student productions, partly because his was the only Asian face in his class.
“I even played a geisha,” he recalled. “We had a student film festival, and out of the five films screened, I was in three of them. ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ came out, ‘The Last Samurai’ came out, ‘Babel’ came out; Japanese actors were on-screen with Hollywood stars in big movies, and the world was changing.”
“Everybody seemed to love my acting in Santa Fe, and in my mind I was like the ultimate Japanese star in school. But in reality ... I signed up with some agencies and did lots of auditions, but nothing came through.”