In a previous post I discussed a method of casting I believe to have been employed on Season 3 of HBO’s Girls whereby there was a conscious effort to cast actors of color in peripheral roles in the wake of backlash against the show for its lack of minority representation. It appears to me that Doctor Who, a series which faced a similar backlash for its representation of people of color, is employing the same method. Continue reading
Forgetting for a second whether I’m personally offended as a person of color over the casting choices in Exodus: Gods and Kings; I find the casting of an almost entirely white cast to play Ancient Egyptians to be flatly absurd by any metric. Casting like this is historically, geographically, and demographically inaccurate, in addition to being quite simply boring. I can think of no better example of defaulting to whiteness than a casting decision such as this one: “we have a story and a setting that fall outside of our modern racial parameters so why not just cast a bunch of white people, right?” I won’t pretend to know exactly what ancient Egyptians or ancient Hebrews looked like and by what, if any, modern racial or ethnic classifications they would likely fall under, but I am confident in saying that they did not look like Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, or Sigourney Weaver. Continue reading
Mixed American Film Buff 