Angelina Jolie, Ben Affleck, And 17 Other White Actors Who Have Played Non-White Characters
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While whitewashing — or casting a white actor to play a non-white person or fictional character, whether by making the character white or having the actor's appearance altered — seems to be less prevalent as time goes on, it's still a problem in Hollywood.
AMC / Via giphy.com
In just a month, Bullet Train will hit theaters. The film, set in Japan, features an ensemble cast that includes Brad Pitt and Joey King — both of whom are playing characters that are Japanese in Kōtarō Isaka's original novel.
Sony Pictures
It got me thinking about other instances of whitewashing in Hollywood — of which there are many.
Universal Pictures / Via giphy.com
Here are 20 of them (and note that this is by no means a comprehensive list):
1.Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in Argo (2012)
Affleck, who directed 2012's Argo, played real-life CIA operative Tony Mendez, who was Mexican-American.
Miami Vice star Edward James Olmos told Deadline that Affleck "should never have played" Mendez, citing Michael Peña, Andy Garcia, and Jimmy Smits as actors who could have taken on the role instead.
2.Marlon Brando as Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956)
Brando donned yellowface to play Sakini, a Japanese man, in the 1956 film. He never publicly addressed his role in Teahouse, but nearly 20 years later, he boycotted the Oscars in protest of how nonwhite characters were portrayed in Hollywood.
He later appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and said, "I don’t think that people generally realize what the motion picture industry has done to the American Indian, as a matter of fact, all ethnic groups. All minorities. All non-whites."
3.Kirsten Dunst as Edwina in The Beguiled (2017)
The 2017 film features a character named Edwina, played by Kirsten Dunst. In the original 1966 novel of the same name, Edwina was biracial. The novel also included a Black female slave character who didn't appear in the film.
In response to criticism of the decision, director Sofia Coppola told BuzzFeed News, "I didn't want to brush over such an important topic in a light way. Young girls watch my films, and this was not the depiction of an African-American character I would want to show them."
4.Jake Gyllenhaal as Dastan in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
Rather than bringing in an actor of Iranian descent to play the titular Persian prince in the 2010 film, Disney cast Gyllenhaal in the role. Nearly 10 years later, he told Yahoo Entertainment that he regretted taking the role, saying, "I think I learned a lot from that movie in that I spend a lot of time trying to be very thoughtful about the roles that I pick and why I’m picking them."
5.Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell (2017)
In yet another instance of a comic book character being whitewashed in a film adaptation, Scarlett Johansson was cast to play a character who is Japanese in the original Manga.
Fans were torn about the casting — the Ringer pointed out that "many Japanese Americans may find Johansson's casting in a Ghost in the Shell movie distressing, while native Japanese observers make nothing of it."
It wasn't the last time Johansson would find herself at the center of a casting controversy. Just a couple years after Ghost in the Shell came out, she was supposed to play a trans man in the biopic Rub & Tug. She ultimately left the project following criticism about a cisgender woman playing a transgender man — but not before commenting on the backlash.
She told As If magazine, "You know, as an actor I should be able to play any person, or any tree, or any animal, because that's my job and the requirements of my job."
After dropping out of the project, she said in a statement to Out, "Our cultural understanding of transgender people continues to advance, and I’ve learned a lot from the community since making my first statement about my casting and realize it was insensitive."
6.Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007)
While Jolie's portrayal of Mariane Pearl — a real person whose mother is Afro-Chinese-Cuban and father is Dutch and Jewish — was met with approval by Pearl herself, many in the Black community didn't appreciate it. It didn't help that Jolie wore dark brown contacts and a wig designed to resemble Pearl's natural hair, and appears to be wearing skin-darkening makeup.
7.Angelina Jolie as Fox in Wanted (2008)
A year after A Mighty Heart came out, Jolie starred in comic book adaptation Wanted, as Fox — a character who was Black in the comic series (and actually inspired by Halle Berry).
8.Josh Hartnett as Eben Oleson in 30 Days of Night (2007)
Hartnett plays Alaskan sheriff Eben Oleson in the 2007 adaptation of the comic book of the same name. In the comic, the character was named Eben Olemaun and was Inuit.
9.Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in Pan (2015)
Mara played the Native American resident of Neverland in the 2015 Peter and Wendy prequel. Following the backlash to her portrayal, she told The Telegraph, "I really hate, hate, hate that I am on that side of the whitewashing conversation. I really do. I don’t ever want to be on that side of it again. I can understand why people were upset and frustrated."
10.Liam Neeson as Ra's al Ghul in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy
Neeson played the Bruce Wayne mentor/villain — who was portrayed as Middle Eastern in the comic books — in 2005 (and again in 2012).
11.Emma Stone as Allison Ng in Aloha (2015)
This particular instance is one of the most perplexing, because it's not just another time when a white actor was chosen to play the role of an actual person of color, or a character of color from a book. Allison Ng is a character unique to the film, and describes herself as being a quarter-Hawaiian and a quarter-Chinese — neither of which Stone is. It would have been very easy to just leave the line out (or just cast an actual Hawaiian actor in the role).
Cameron Crowe, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, later offered a "heartfelt apology [to] all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice." He also said that the character, who was "a super-proud quarter Hawaiian who was frustrated that, by all outward appearances, she looked nothing like one," was based on a real person.
12.Sir Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello (1965)
Othello is one of the few characters of color in Shakespeare's plays, and has often been portrayed by white men in Blackface. Fortunately, that trend seems to be coming to an end, but it was still in full force back in 1965 when Olivier played the character.
13.Natalie Portman as Lena and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dr. Ventress in Annihilation (2018)
Portman's character in the original novels the 2018 film is based on is specified to be of Asian descent, while Leigh's character is half-Native American and half-white, something the filmmakers and actors have said they weren't aware of this at the time of casting. Although that just sounds like they didn't do their due diligence when researching the books, since all three book in the series came out in 2014, and casting didn't begin until 2015.
14.Mena Suvari as Brandi Boski in Stuck (2007)
Stuck is sort of a bizarre film to begin with. It's about a woman who hits a man with her car, sending him flying through her windshield, where he gets stuck. Instead of helping him get out or calling 911, she drives back to her house with him still inside her windshield and parks him in her garage because she doesn't want to get in trouble.
Even stranger, it's based on the true story of Chante Jawan Mallard, a Black nursing assistant. Instead of casting a Black actor in the role, director Stuart Gordon cast Suvari, who inexplicably sports cornrows in the film.
15.Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
I would never rank instances of whitewashing, because they're all bad, but if I were going to, I'm pretty sure Rooney's portrayal of I. Y. Yunioshi, a Japanese man, would be in the top three worst. It's just gross, and both director Blake Edwards and producer Richard Shepherd have expressed regret over the decision not to cast an actual Japanese actor.
Rooney, meanwhile, said in a 2008 interview, "It breaks my heart. Blake Edwards...wanted me to do it because he was a comedy director. They hired me to do this overboard, and we had fun doing it... Never in all the more than 40 years after we made it — not one complaint. Every place I've gone in the world, people say, 'God, you were so funny.' Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, 'Mickey, you were out of this world.'"
Kind of missed the point, but he did also say that if he knew how much it would offend people, he wouldn't have taken the role.
16.Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in Cleopatra (1963)
Cleopatra has been portrayed in film many times, and Taylor is just one of the white actors to take on the role. Sophia Loren and Vivien Leigh are among the others to play the Egyptian queen.
17.Johnny Depp as Tonto in The Lone Ranger (2013)
After being cast as Native American sidekick Tonto, Depp claimed his great-grandmother "was quite a bit of Native American," though according to a biography about him, he's mostly of English descent, as well as French, German, and Irish Ancestry.
He received a lot of flak from the Native American community for his portrayal, and it wasn't the last time — in 2019, his Dior ad for the fragrance Sauvage was pulled following accusations of racism and cultural appropriation.
18.Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange (2016)
In the Marvel comics, the Ancient One is portrayed as an Asian man — something Swinton is decidedly not. While Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige later told Men's Health that they thought they were "being so smart, and so cutting-edge," he said in the same interview that it was a mistake.
Swinton, meanwhile, originally defended her casting, but later told Variety that she was "very, very grateful" that Feige expressed regret over it.
19.Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story (1961)
Maria being Puerto Rican is kind of a big plot point in West Side Story, so the casting of Wood is still kind of baffling. She and George Chakiris, who played Maria's brother Bernardo, were both put in brownface, something Rita Moreno commented on during an interview with the In the Thick podcast.
"I remember saying to the makeup man one day ― because it was like putting mud on my face, it was really dark, and I’m a fairly fair Hispanic," she said. "And I said to the makeup man one day, 'My God! Why do we all have to be the same color? Puerto Ricans are French and Spanish...' And it’s true, we are very many different colors, we’re Taino Indian, we are Black, some of us. And the makeup man actually said to me, 'What? Are you a racist?' I was so flabbergasted that I couldn’t come back with an answer."
