Shaun Toub. Adrian Pasdar. Catherine Bell. Sarah Shahi. Omid Djalili. Shohreh Aghdashloo. Anthony Azizi. Bahar Soomekh. Fairuza Balk. Shiva Rose.
You don't seriously think any of those names are as well known as the guy who headlined Day After Tomorrow, Brokeback Mountain, Donnie Darko, etc? I've only heard of like half those names and I'm pretty sure none of them ever headlined a well known movie.
Not at all my point. You asked if there were any Iranian actors that anyone in America had even heard of, implying that you believed there were none. I demonstrated that your belief was false. The American acting community is more diverse than you give it credit for.
And it follows that if the producers' primary factor in casting the role was the attractiveness of the actor to female moviegoers, surely there must be some good-looking Iranian-American actors out there, famous or not.
Not to mention that there are other actors in the film besides Gyllenhaal. Yet despite there being plenty of Iranian-American actors -- and surely plenty more Iranian actors in England, Iran, and elsewhere -- not one of the film's major players is Iranian.
If an actor can pretend to be somebody else from a different place and a different time, why can't he also pretend to be somebody else of a different ethnic group?
As I stated in the
Last Airbender casting threads, the thing that's being overlooked here is that this is a hiring issue. Forget about casting for movies and put it more generally. If a nonwhite person is competing for a job with a white person, and the nonwhite person is more qualified but the white person gets the job, that's job discrimination. It's not about the ethnicity of an imaginary character; it's about whether real live people are being deprived of job opportunities specifically because they're not white.
Of course, as in
The Last Airbender, it's reasonable to look for the best actor for the role first and the most ethnically appropriate one second. But the lead cast of this film with "Persia" in its name has no Iranian or Mideastern actors at all, and the only nonwhite actor in the main cast, Ben Kingsley, is playing the villain. That raises questions.
Great. So, by that logic, a vaguely brown actor should be able to play Green Lantern.
Err, ever heard of
John Stewart?
Why is it a white actor? A darker actor should be able to play Spiderman. Why are they only considering white actors?
Indeed, and there's
an essay on io9 today asking exactly that same question. There's no reason why Hal Jordan or Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne has to be white. Even with
The Last Airbender, it's reasonable that they've shuffled the ethnicities of the fantasy nations around to fit the best actors they found for the various roles, because there's still a good amount of diversity overall.
However, if your movie is called
Prince of Persia, that pretty much makes it clear that your characters' ethnicity is supposed to be Persian.
The next Doctor Who could be brown. Right? Why not?
IIRC, a couple of Afro-British actors, Paterson Joseph and Chiwetel Ejiofor, were reportedly under consideration for the role. Way back in "Destiny of the Daleks," one of Romana's "test drive" regenerations (don't ask) was a statuesque black woman.
The fact that the movie has come out and one of its first plot points is that Gyllenhaal's character was adopted should put this controversy to rest.
No, because the controversy isn't solely about Gyllenhaal's character. It's about the entire cast.
I never saw this particular casting as being very far from the mark. Jake isn't Persian, but I know several Persians who don't look Persian, one who actually looks a hell of a lot like Jake Gyllenhaal. His nose is really the only feature that is distinctly European.
...
White people are constantly playing characters that are from a very different white background. Italians play Germans play Englishmen play Nordic play French play Russian, etc. etc. etc.
Asians are constantly playing different Asian ethnicities. Japanese playing Chinese and vice versa, Koreans playing both and both playing Korean. When you get into south-east Asia just about every group is called in for any south-east Asian.
When casting African characters, little to no consideration goes into finding regionally accurate Africans. Even my black friends (other than one who has been to about 80% of the continent) can't tell the difference between most regional/ethnic Africans, in part because the distinction is never made for us in media so we never learn.
In the long line of ethnically inaccurate casting, this rates about a 2/10 on the scale.
Those are fair points. Still, it's worth raising the question, and worth pushing Hollywood to try harder to cast inclusively. Ultimately, what matters most is not whether a given character is cast with the right ethnicity, but whether there's enough hiring diversity industry-wide. And if there really was a belief on the part of certain producers or casting directors that a nonwhite lead couldn't fill the seats, that's a red flag that needs to be addressed. As with
The Last Airbender, that's the key question: was there intentional exclusion or bias in the process? The comments released by the TLA filmmakers have persuaded me that they made their best effort to cast as fairly as possible, and that early suggestions that they favored white leads were in error. However, in this case, I'd consider the question still open. Did they fairly consider all ethnicities, or did they act on a belief that white actors were more marketable?
