Hollywood’s glaring race problem
The film industry has a tragic, systemic and apparently addictive history of casting white actors to play Asians
Two images released last week from upcoming films highlight one glaring Hollywood problem. The first was the visage of Tilda Swinton in the debut trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange, in which the actress — shorn and wearing the white robes of a Tibetan monk — plays the Ancient One. In the Doctor Strange comics, the Ancient One is like Dumbledore meets Yoda: When the shattered former surgeon Stephen Strange makes his way deep into the Himalayas looking for enlightenment and redemption, he becomes a student of the mystically adept, absolutely Asian Ancient One.
A few days later, Paramount unveiled the first image from its 2017 adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, the classic Japanese animated film adapted from Japanese manga. Scarlett Johansson is playing the Major, a law enforcement officer who has subjected herself to so many cybernetic upgrades that she is more machine than human. In the comics and movies, her name is Motoko Kusanagi, and as that most definitely implies, the character was written as Asian.
Given Hollywood’s tragic, systemic and apparently addictive history of casting white actors to play characters of Asian origin, this sort of thing is nothing new. As far back as 1915 — when Mary Pickford starred in Madame Butterfly — producers and directors have had no problem casting white actors and actresses as people of colour. John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Quinn, Boris Karloff, Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando, Alec Guinness, Mickey Rooney, Joel Grey, Linda Hunt, Max von Sydow, Peter Sellers, David Carradine, Mike Myers — and many, many others — have played characters of Asian descent.
As American society got “woke,” some