On Sensitive Casting

Now this one might be a bit controversial.

In the movie Supernova, released late last year, Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a gay couple impacted by early-onset Alzheimer's. I haven't seen it yet. I have a toddler, so opportunities for any screen time not involving Elmo and Big Bird are very limited. I mention this in the interests of full disclosure, although it's beside the point for the purposes of this discussion. Let me explain.

There's been a lot of recent conversation about "sensitive casting" in TV and film. The argument that you should try and hire actors whose real-life identities align with the characters they're portraying onscreen does have some merit. With no disrespect intended to Yul Brynner, if someone were to remake The King and I today, they would get into enormous trouble if they hired a white guy to play the lead. Given that nowadays there are any number of prominent and excellent Asian male actors working in film, there would be no good reason not to cast one. And Brynner is one of the more benign examples. Hollywood has a long and sordid record of actors blacking up or otherwise hamming it up to portray nonwhite characters in excruciatingly racist ways - Breakfast at Tiffany's, the infamous C. Thomas Howell comedy Soul Man, and just about every Western shot before 1970 being some of the more notorious examples. Even outside film and theater, the ugly legacy of blackface leaves no justification for racially insensitive casting today.

Beyond that is where we get into gray areas, and this is where Supernova comes in. Offscreen, both Mr Firth and Mr Tucci are openly straight. This has led some people to wonder whether they should be playing gay characters. There are, after all, many excellent and bankable gay actors on casting agents' books. A similar discussion arose, I seem to recall, over the TV show Transparent, in which the cis male actor Jeffrey Tambor (before he got into very public hot water for unrelated reasons) starred as a transgender woman. Was it appropriate, some wondered, to cast someone in a drama centered on transgender issues who had not lived the trans experience? Another ongoing controversy surrounds Sia's directorial debut Music, in which her onstage stand-in Maddie Ziegler, a neurotypical person, plays a girl with autism. A performer who is autistic publicly took Sia to task, pointing out that she and many other actors who are on the spectrum could have taken on the role. Sia, for her part, didn't help matters with her irascible response that perhaps the woman wasn't that talented anyway.

Hamfisted as that was, I can appreciate Sia's frustration. We can try a quick brain game to see just how quickly things become absurd when you make demands like this. For example, what about all the British actors who play American characters onscreen, and vice versa? As impeccable as Meryl Streep's accent is in movies like Plenty and The Iron Lady, she is not British. Foul play!

Even a "woke" film like Dances with Wolves would run into trouble if you took things to their logical conclusion. Yes, Kevin Costner cast indigenous actors to play the Native American characters - but almost none of them were Sioux, Pawnee or Kiowa, the three nations depicted onscreen. Was that insensitive casting? Did he have to hire Graham Greene, an Oneida, to play the medicine man Kicking Bird? Or Wes Studi, a Cherokee, to play the Pawnee warrior leader? Were there no Lakota or Pawnee actors available? Quite aside from the fact that the tribe Lieutenant Dunbar becomes involved with in the book is Comanche, not Sioux, and what's the excuse for that?

And what was Natalie Dormer, a 21st century woman, doing portraying the16th century English queen Anne Boleyn in The Tudors? For that matter, would we actually expect Ms Dormer to have her head cut off so that she could appropriately convey the experience of being beheaded? We're getting into the realms of the truly silly now, but I think you get my drift.

We're losing sight of something here. Drama has a long and extensive history of people pretending to be something they're not, going all the way back to when the Ancient Greek counterpart to Anthony Hopkins turned out not, in fact, to be Oedipus's mother. Indeed, this - a point which should be obvious to everyone - is what acting is. Take Messrs Firth and Tucci playing gay characters. Yes, there are great gay actors who could have taken those roles. And you know what? Upwards of 90% of the parts most of those actors have played in their careers will have been characters who were straight. Nobody worries about that, much as nobody worries about a black actor in a movie playing a character who isn't black in the book it's adapted from. Casting any piece of drama would be next to impossible if every actor's experience had to exactly match that of the character they were playing. You quickly get to a point where such a standard simply isn't reasonable.

I suspect what all this is really about is opportunity. There's no shortage of gay people in the entertainment industry and never has been. That's because there's no barrier. Rock Hudson was able to run around portraying men who liked to do it with the ladies for his entire career, because he could disguise who he really was relatively easily. It's far more difficult for a black actor to pass herself off as white, for a trans actor to play cisgender, or for a disabled actor to convince an audience he's able-bodied. So those groups have, until recently, been underrepresented or outright invisible in the film and TV industry.

But if that's the case, why not just say so? For that matter, why not create an environment in which anybody can play any part? It's not like Hollywood is known for realism. Gay men playing straight men, 30 year olds playing teenagers and humans playing aliens are par for the course. They've been known to cast guys from Los Angeles as English folk heroes, retired Austrian bodybuilders with thick accents as CIA agents, and Sandra Bullock as an astronaut. The musical Hamilton has made strides in that direction, with its deliberate casting of actors of color to portray the notably white Founding Fathers; the inevitable forthcoming movie adaptation will presumably follow suit. So it wouldn't be that much of a leap for a blind Pakistani-American man in a wheelchair to play Renee Richards, surely? Or Oedipus's mother.