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Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be Ignored. cont.
In September, it was revealed that in the planned adaptation of the Japanese manga series Death Note, the hero, a boy with dark powers named Light Yagami, would be renamed simply Light and played by the white actor Nat Wolff. In “The Martian,” released in October, the white actress Mackenzie Davis stepped into the role of the NASA employee Mindy Park, who was conceived in the novel as Korean-American.
The list goes on. In December, set photographs from the coming “Absolutely Fabulous” film showed the Scottish actress Janette Tough dressed as an over-the-top Asian character. Last month, Marvel Studios released a trailer for “Doctor Strange,” in which a character that had originated in comic books as a Tibetan monk was reimagined as a Celtic mystic played by Tilda Swinton.
And in the live-action American film adaptation of the manga series Ghost in the Shell, scheduled for next year, the lead character, Major Motoko Kusanagi, will be called Major and played by Scarlett Johansson in a black bob.
Studios say that their films are diverse. “Like other Marvel films, several characters in ‘Doctor Strange’ are significant departures from the source material, not limited by race, gender or ethnicity,” the Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said in a statement. Ms. Swinton will play a character that was originally male, and Chiwetel Ejiofor a character that was originally white. Paramount and DreamWorks, the studios behind “Ghost in the Shell,” said that the film reflects “a diverse array of cultures and countries.”
But many Asian-American actors aren’t convinced. “It’s all so plainly outlandish,” Mr. Takei said. “It’s getting to the point where it’s almost laughable.”
The Academy Awards telecast in February added insult to injury. The show dwelled on the diversity complaints aired through #OscarsSoWhite, yet blithely mocked Asian-Americans with punch lines that banked on Asian stereotypes. The host, Chris Rock, brought three Asian-American children onstage to serve as a sight gag in a joke made at their expense.
Chris Rock, right, and child actors in an Oscars skit that offended many Asian-Americans. Credit Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press
“I have never seen the Asian-American community get so organized so quickly,” said Janet Yang, a producer who serves as a liaison between Hollywood and Chinese studios. She added, “It was the final straw.”
Within days, Ms. Yang and 24 other Academy members, including the actress Sandra Oh, the director Ang Lee and Mr. Takei, signed a letter to the academy taking it to task for the telecast’s offensive jokes. The academy’s terse reply only stoked the flames. Mr. Takei called it “a bland, corporate response.”
Online, even more Asian-American actors and activists have spoken out with raw, unapologetic anger.
Ms. Wen castigated “Ghost in the Shell,” tweeting about “whitewashing” and throwing in a dismissive emoji. Mr. Takei went off on “Doctor Strange” on his Facebook page: “Hollywood has been casting white actors in Asian roles for decades now, and we can’t keep pretending there isn’t something deeper at work here.”
Tilda Swinton (with Benedict Cumberbatch), playing a Celtic mystic who was Tibetan in the source comic book, in the coming “Doctor Strange.” Credit Marvel
Mr. Nanjiani jumped on Twitter to call out the red carpet photographer who told him, “Smile, you’re in America now.” (“I know when someone is racist, the fault is theirs and not yours,” he wrote. “But, in the moment, it makes you feel flattened, reduced and bullied.”) And Ms. Cho helped start a hashtag campaign, #whitewashedOUT.
“It’s intense,” Ms. Cho posted at the height of the action. “It’s that we have been invisible for so long we don’t even know what we can do.”
Meanwhile, television shows — competing for fresh content and audiences as the number of scripted series has increased dramatically in recent years — have helped expand the boundaries of what was once thought possible. Asian-Americans increasingly play leads and love interests and star in multiple family sitcoms.
Following “Fresh Off the Boat,” ABC debuted the sitcom “Dr. Ken,” featuring an Asian-American family led by the show’s creator, Ken Jeong, plus the drama “Quantico” starring the Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra. On CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Rachel Bloom, as the title character, pines after the hunky Vincent Rodriguez III, who is Filipino-American. They join such mold-breakers as Mindy Kaling, creator and star of “The Mindy Project,” and Lucy Liu, who plays a reimagined Dr. Watson in “Elementary.”
These shows help, but the issue is pervasive, including on TV. “The mainstream Hollywood thinking still seems to be that movies and stories about straight white people are universal, and that anyone else is more niche,” Mr. Ansari wrote in an email. “It’s just not true. I’ve been watching characters with middle-age white-guy problems since I was a small Indian boy.”
In films, a few roles have transcended stereotypes: Mr. Takei in the first “Star Trek” installments, Ms. Liu in the “Charlie’s Angels” features, and John Cho and Kal Penn in the stoner hit “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” and its sequels. And more are in development: a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel “Crazy Rich Asians” is underway, and the Vietnamese-American actress Kelly Marie Tran will play a major role in the next “Star Wars” installment.
But mostly, Asian-Americans are invisible. Though they make up 5.4 percent of the United States population, more than half of film, television and streaming properties feature zero named or speaking Asian characters, a February report from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California found. Only 1.4 percent of lead characters in a sample of studio films released in 2014 were Asian.
For Asian-American actors, the dearth of opportunities compounds itself. “An Asian person who is competing against white people, for an audience of white people, has to train for that opportunity like it’s the Olympics,” Ms. Wu said. “An incredibly talented Asian actor might be considered for a leading role maybe once or twice in a lifetime. That’s a highly pressured situation.”
In September, it was revealed that in the planned adaptation of the Japanese manga series Death Note, the hero, a boy with dark powers named Light Yagami, would be renamed simply Light and played by the white actor Nat Wolff. In “The Martian,” released in October, the white actress Mackenzie Davis stepped into the role of the NASA employee Mindy Park, who was conceived in the novel as Korean-American.
The list goes on. In December, set photographs from the coming “Absolutely Fabulous” film showed the Scottish actress Janette Tough dressed as an over-the-top Asian character. Last month, Marvel Studios released a trailer for “Doctor Strange,” in which a character that had originated in comic books as a Tibetan monk was reimagined as a Celtic mystic played by Tilda Swinton.
And in the live-action American film adaptation of the manga series Ghost in the Shell, scheduled for next year, the lead character, Major Motoko Kusanagi, will be called Major and played by Scarlett Johansson in a black bob.
Studios say that their films are diverse. “Like other Marvel films, several characters in ‘Doctor Strange’ are significant departures from the source material, not limited by race, gender or ethnicity,” the Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said in a statement. Ms. Swinton will play a character that was originally male, and Chiwetel Ejiofor a character that was originally white. Paramount and DreamWorks, the studios behind “Ghost in the Shell,” said that the film reflects “a diverse array of cultures and countries.”
But many Asian-American actors aren’t convinced. “It’s all so plainly outlandish,” Mr. Takei said. “It’s getting to the point where it’s almost laughable.”
The Academy Awards telecast in February added insult to injury. The show dwelled on the diversity complaints aired through #OscarsSoWhite, yet blithely mocked Asian-Americans with punch lines that banked on Asian stereotypes. The host, Chris Rock, brought three Asian-American children onstage to serve as a sight gag in a joke made at their expense.
Chris Rock, right, and child actors in an Oscars skit that offended many Asian-Americans. Credit Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press
“I have never seen the Asian-American community get so organized so quickly,” said Janet Yang, a producer who serves as a liaison between Hollywood and Chinese studios. She added, “It was the final straw.”
Within days, Ms. Yang and 24 other Academy members, including the actress Sandra Oh, the director Ang Lee and Mr. Takei, signed a letter to the academy taking it to task for the telecast’s offensive jokes. The academy’s terse reply only stoked the flames. Mr. Takei called it “a bland, corporate response.”
Online, even more Asian-American actors and activists have spoken out with raw, unapologetic anger.
Ms. Wen castigated “Ghost in the Shell,” tweeting about “whitewashing” and throwing in a dismissive emoji. Mr. Takei went off on “Doctor Strange” on his Facebook page: “Hollywood has been casting white actors in Asian roles for decades now, and we can’t keep pretending there isn’t something deeper at work here.”
Tilda Swinton (with Benedict Cumberbatch), playing a Celtic mystic who was Tibetan in the source comic book, in the coming “Doctor Strange.” Credit Marvel
Mr. Nanjiani jumped on Twitter to call out the red carpet photographer who told him, “Smile, you’re in America now.” (“I know when someone is racist, the fault is theirs and not yours,” he wrote. “But, in the moment, it makes you feel flattened, reduced and bullied.”) And Ms. Cho helped start a hashtag campaign, #whitewashedOUT.
“It’s intense,” Ms. Cho posted at the height of the action. “It’s that we have been invisible for so long we don’t even know what we can do.”
Meanwhile, television shows — competing for fresh content and audiences as the number of scripted series has increased dramatically in recent years — have helped expand the boundaries of what was once thought possible. Asian-Americans increasingly play leads and love interests and star in multiple family sitcoms.
Following “Fresh Off the Boat,” ABC debuted the sitcom “Dr. Ken,” featuring an Asian-American family led by the show’s creator, Ken Jeong, plus the drama “Quantico” starring the Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra. On CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Rachel Bloom, as the title character, pines after the hunky Vincent Rodriguez III, who is Filipino-American. They join such mold-breakers as Mindy Kaling, creator and star of “The Mindy Project,” and Lucy Liu, who plays a reimagined Dr. Watson in “Elementary.”
These shows help, but the issue is pervasive, including on TV. “The mainstream Hollywood thinking still seems to be that movies and stories about straight white people are universal, and that anyone else is more niche,” Mr. Ansari wrote in an email. “It’s just not true. I’ve been watching characters with middle-age white-guy problems since I was a small Indian boy.”
In films, a few roles have transcended stereotypes: Mr. Takei in the first “Star Trek” installments, Ms. Liu in the “Charlie’s Angels” features, and John Cho and Kal Penn in the stoner hit “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” and its sequels. And more are in development: a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel “Crazy Rich Asians” is underway, and the Vietnamese-American actress Kelly Marie Tran will play a major role in the next “Star Wars” installment.
But mostly, Asian-Americans are invisible. Though they make up 5.4 percent of the United States population, more than half of film, television and streaming properties feature zero named or speaking Asian characters, a February report from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California found. Only 1.4 percent of lead characters in a sample of studio films released in 2014 were Asian.
For Asian-American actors, the dearth of opportunities compounds itself. “An Asian person who is competing against white people, for an audience of white people, has to train for that opportunity like it’s the Olympics,” Ms. Wu said. “An incredibly talented Asian actor might be considered for a leading role maybe once or twice in a lifetime. That’s a highly pressured situation.”
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