Whiteface/Blackface/Yellowface

Doctor Strange makes its cinematic debut this week, and almost forgotten is the brief flurry of complaint that arose when it was revealed that the role of The Ancient, who was an Asiatic man in the comic (excuse me, graphic novel) was being played by Tilda Swinton, a Caucasian woman (albeit a rather ethereal looking one).  This followed on the heels of the outrage over the casting of Emma Stone as an Asian character in Cameron Crowe’s film Aloha, a controversy that surely would have been bigger if anyone had actually paid to see that movie.

There is something to be said about Hollywood’s habit of casting White actors in minority roles.  Maybe you could somewhat justify it decades ago, when minority actors were rare, but in this day and age it shouldn’t be too hard for Cameron Crowe to find an Asian actress to play an Asian character (if I understand Cameron Crowe’s defense, he said the character was based on a friend of his who was half-Asian and did, in fact, look like Emma Stone).

So, can we all agree that when it comes to films and TV show, Hollywood should cast ethnically appropriate actors?  Not so fast.  Look at the casting of Tilda Swinton as The Ancient.  The role was conceived for an Asian man, but it was reimagined as a raceless/sexless entity.  Swinton’s appearance is such that she once starred in a film, Orlando, where she played one character as both a man AND a woman.  Here the filmmakers took liberties with the source material to get something a little less Earth-bound.

I find it hard to completely dismiss all attempts at cross-racial casting.  It is the nature of actors, especially great ones, to stretch their craft, which includes playing characters of other ethnicities.  If Marlon Brando wants to play an Asian in Teahouse of the August Moon, who is to say he shouldn’t?  Robert Downey Jr. got an Oscar nomination for Tropic Thunder, where he played an Australian actor playing an African-American character.  So, which is worse, an American actor playing an Australian actor, or the character of an Australian actor playing an African-American character?

Of course, some line must be drawn.  It is one thing for Brando to ineffectively play an Asian character, but quite another for Mickey Rooney to play a grotesque racial stereotype in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  The problem with Rooney’s performance isn’t that he is a White man playing an Asian, it is that a mediocre actor is playing a one dimensional stereotype. 

Mickey Rooney playing an Asian is one thing, but German actor Peter Lorre playing Japanese sleuth Mr. Moto is quite another.  In the six Mr. Moto films Lorre’s presentation is subtle, multi-dimensional, and wholly respectful towards the race he is portraying.  While not in Lorre’s class as an actor, Swedish actor Werner Oland also treated the character of Charlie Chan with respect; Lorre and Oland were giving sympathetic performance of Asian characters at a time when virtually all portrayals were uniformly negative (I would recommend the book Charlie Chan by Yunte Huang for an examination of cultural attitudes towards Asian characters in the 1920-30s).

It is also unfair to impose modern ideas of casting on previous eras.  Anthony Quinn, who was from Mexico, made a career out of playing a variety of ethnicities, including Greeks (Zorba the Greek, The Greek Tycoon), Mexicans (Viva Zapata), Arabs (Lawrence of Arabia), and Italians (La Strada, The Secret of Santo Vittoria) to name a few.  Maybe these films should have been made with authentic ethnic performers, but for many years the standard procedure was to hire someone with dark hair to play any swarthy ethnic character.  Maybe this casting policy only made the number of roles available for ethnic actors more scarce, but the reality is there were fewer options when casting ethnic roles.

And what of mixed-race characters?  When Miss Saigon came across the Pond, Actor’s Equity wouldn’t approve the casting of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer, who was described as half Vietnamese and half-French, insisting that the role go to an Asian actor.  The producers argued that the role was described as half-Caucasian, so why couldn’t the role be played by Pryce, who won awards in London and subsequently won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

There is another question—if you want to say that all roles should be cast in a racially appropriate manner, then where do you draw the line?  There was a minor kerfuffle over the casting of John Cho, who is of Korean ancestry, in the role of Hikaru Sulu, a Japanese character in Star Trek.  I seem to recall there was a proposal to make a movie based on a Tony Hillerman novel with actor Graham Greene as Joe Leaphorn, a truly inspired casting choice, but the project went nowhere after protests due to the fact that Greene, while Native American (well, native-Canadian), wasn’t Navaho like Leaphorn.

Are we going to restrict actors to only playing characters that match up with their genetic heritage?  If your grandparents emigrated from Scotland, you can’t play someone who’s Irish?  I don’t think there should be a hard and fast rule, but it should be treated as a factor in the casting decision.  If Mickey Rooney wants to play a buck-toothed caricature of a Japanese person, don’t cast him.  If Peter Lorre wants to play a Japanese character with dignity and humanity, put him in the movie.

It reminds me on The Simpson’s episode when Bart ran for class President and his opponent said “There are no easy answers,” to which Bart replied, “We want easy answers!  We want easy answers!”  We want straight-forward rules regarding race and identity, but there just aren’t any.