ASIAN ACTORS FIND FEW LEADING ROLES
Asian actors find few leading roles and get lower pay.
Korean American actor Edward Hong has played characters in dozens of TV shows and movies over the years, including as “Math Olympian Dude,” “Chinese Man #2” and, in a top-rated network sitcom, “Male Night Nurse.”
Soon, he will appear in the independent film “Please Stand By” as the “Cinnabon Guy.”
“In Hollywood, there are a lot of opportunities, but it is always for small roles with one-liners,” Hong said in an interview. “If you want to be a store owner, the nail salon lady or the IT-tech guy, those are the parts, but rarely do we get a chance to be the main character.”
He’s not bitter, he said, just realistic about the plight of being an Asian American actor in Hollywood.
Decades of racist caricatures — think Mickey Rooney playing the bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — have given way to an industry that is more inclusive, but where leading roles remain scarce. Two weeks ago served as a stark reminder that even those who have reached some of the highest levels in the entertainment industry still face obstacles. Two prominent actors — Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park — quit CBS’ “Hawaii Five0” amid claims they were paid less than their white counterparts.
The controversy has motivated actors to be more vocal about what they say have been decades of inequities.
“The path to equality is rarely easy,” Kim wrote in a message on Facebook, thanking fans for supporting him on “Hawaii Five-0.”
Two years after the #OscarsSoWhite campaign shined a harsh light on Hollywood’s hiring and casting practices, some progress has been made.
The film and TV industries have shown a heightened awareness of diversity and greenlighted more films with diverse casts. Television programs headlined by minorities, such as Fox’s “Empire” and ABC’s “black-ish,” have turned in strong ratings performances. Netflix’s “Master of None” stars the popular comedian Aziz Ansari, whose parents emigrated from India.
There are few other Asian Americans in leading roles beyond ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” loosely based around the experiences of an Asian immigrant family in the 1980s, and ABC’s “Designated Survivor,” which depicts a determined FBI agent played by Maggie Q.
But problems persist, particularly for Asian Americans. Filmmakers have tried to fend off charges of “whitewashing” even as they continue to rely on white actors to portray Asians on screen. Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of a Japanese manga, “Death Note,” stirred controversy when a producer, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, said the production searched for Asian actors but “couldn’t find the right person,” in large part because actors from Asia “didn’t speak the perfect English.”
That came after an outcry over Scarlett Johansson’s casting as the heroine in “Ghost in the Shell,” this year’s remake of a classic Japanese anime. In Marvel’s “Doctor Strange” last year, Tilda Swinton played the Ancient One, a character that is an Asian man in the original comics.
Even the starring role in the big-budget Chinese period action film “The Great Wall” went to Matt Damon.
“There is a bias against Asian Americans,” said Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor at Biola University who studies race and ethnicity in film and television. “I feel like we are invisible in society. We are nondescript and in a way dehumanized by not existing in scenes or having speaking roles. We are just part of the backdrop.”
Asian actors have been getting more work these days, in large part because of the flow of money from China. Movie studio executives hoping to enhance a film’s financial prospects in China, the world’s secondlargest film market, have rounded out their casts with Asian faces. But those are often background roles.
“The Chinese actors say: ‘We are just flower vases. We don’t speak; we just stand there and look pretty,’” Hong said.