this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Any actor should be able to play any role regardless of race or gender. Anything else is systemic discrimination.
"You can't play shakespeare because you're black!" screams the basement dwelling internet troll at the kenyan shakespeare society.
I don't agree.
In most modern movies it doesn't matter because they are full of random stuff anyway. Multiverses, magic, history that never happened, and so on.
But if they were to make a movie about an african tribe of the 1800s based on real events I wouldn't be able to take that movie seriously if half or all of them had pinkish-beige skin or any too obviously genetically impossible traits for the geological area and time the movie plays in.
Immersion sometimes also means accuracy.
Any knee-jerk blanket statements like yours are bad. Not as bad as the racist people who just want to find dumb reasons to exclude actors with skin colors darker than theirs, but still just not very smart.
Which is true for many here.
People really need to find the sweet spots between extremes, sheesh.
Well, movies based on comics are inherently also tied to a very visual canon. And, arguably, their whole point is putting those exact visuals on the big screen (for an audience that grew up reading the comics and now has money).
The way to get that right is to make characters and stories that look and feel exactly like the comics, but more and better. Only good change is when you fix something that was broken or janky.
Arguably the ww2 era worldviews and gender and US biases are good targets to fix, of course. But changing the visuals starkly will still be an obvious mistake. Especially when there's actually nearly 100 years worth of stories and characters to pick and mix from and no reason you can't add more.
Don't break the fucking canon! And that includes the visuals.
Yea, that I can agree on too.
Changing established characters from something people already identify with breaks that connection and result in anger for obvious reasons.
So in that case, Americans can only play Americans, Brits can only play Brits etc.
It's noticeable how this week's russian psyop style Hollywood furore is over a black actress playing a fictional greek character not Americans and Brits playing fictional greek characters
People like you are the reason why I specifically chose the words: "Any too obviously genetically impossible traits"
Americans and brits do not look clearly different. Similar enough.
But you must have skipped that part of what I wrote or have just jumped to a knee-jerk answer after the first words?
Also: americans are a nation of immigrants. Except the few native Americans, so they can be realistically be played by a wild mix.
Americans have giant chins
The Clinton Lewinsky chin
Top 10 countries of origin for non native Americans which are like 99% of America today:
Top ten countries of origin for Americans (non-native)
(1 generation ≈ 25 years. Based on US Census self-reported ancestry.)
Those meager few generations don't do anything for defining a specific look. Americans are genetically just everything thrown together while pretending to be "established".
And these are just top ten. Look at how many percent are still open to be filled with a large number of small percentage origins....
So from ur PoV, it would also then be fine if for example a white actor would play MLK in a movie about him?
The difference is that MLK is a real person whose appearance we know.
Helen is a fictional myth. Go find a real depiction of her appearance (not a stylized one, as in art, which is an interpretation).
I won't be happy until a big Nigerian woman plays Sir Winston Churchill
He would just be a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude.
Dudeception
In principle I agree>!!<, but in practice it's not clear cut.
The main one is some historic accuracy, I say some because the color of the skin doesn't really matter for most things set in some time period or era where a race wasn't particularly present.
The second one is just how it looks, we'll see how well casting Snape for the new Harry Potter goes as it seems to be Harry's father is bullying the weird black kid. Another one is the Artemis Fowl movie which cases a woman as leader for the Fairy unit, which undermines the actual accomplishment of Holly being the first to get here place as a woman. It's not the end of the world, but it changes the tone and plot.
Probably not the end of the world, but these problems fall on the same line as other poor adaption/remake choices that actively hurt the story is try to tell. Not everyone can fit into a role in a story, and I don't think that's systematic discrimination. And I reiterate, it largely depends on the setting of the story. For most things, gener and race is not a big factor.
I see a lot of criticism of Western media which in my opinion is rooted in misogyny and racism. And it's not even honest criticism it's divisive culture war bullshit. Of course ragebait drives traffic but it's reached a point where hate watching is a thing now, which is just sad.
You're implying that the next Black Panther could be played by Tom Cruise. I'm not sure I'd be happy about that.
I was thinking vanilla ice
But yeah
snoke him