The Mahabharata
Once when I was teaching English in the 1990s, I showed my students the BBC’s production of Othello with Anthony Hopkins. It was a very good production, with Hopkins at his blue-eyed best, and Bob Hoskins gives a great performance as a cockey-accented Iago. However, on the day I showed it to my students, barely two minutes has passed before one of the girls asked: “How come Othello isn’t black?”
“Because Anthony Hopkins isn’t black,” I said, and everyone laughed.
I hadn’t meant to be flippant, and I inadvertently dismissed a question which, I later realized, was only natural. I had been a student of Shakespeare for years, and I hadn’t even considered the reaction that my nineteen-year-old students might have to a white man playing a black character. It had, after all, been the norm for white (usually English) actors to play Othello for almost four hundred years. What I had failed to realize that, to the modern sensibilities of my students, it was unthinkable that Othello should be played by anything but a black actor. Anything else would seem ridiculous.
And it wasn’t just kids who felt that way. The English director Peter Brook encountered a similar kind of reaction when his magnificent theatrical adaptation of The Mahabharata came out on TV. In Brook’s play, for example, the heroes and villains of the ancient Hindu epic are played by Germans, Americans, Greeks, Africans, and (of course) Indians.
Although I didn’t understand it at the time, Brook’s choices of actors represented an early example of what has come to be known as colour-blind casting. (Yes, that’s colour with a “u”, the idea being of British origin; more on this later.) The idea of colour-blind casting states that roles should be cast without regard to the actor’s race or ethnicity. The casting director should be “blind” to such matters.
You wouldn’t think that this would work, but somehow it does. In fact, the casting of non-Indian actors in various parts makes the work feel more realistic—more epic, in fact—than it would have been otherwise, in part because each actor seems perfectly tuned to his role.
I’m not sure why, but the practice of colour-blind casting has not yet taken off in America. Perhaps this is because of the obvious, rampant racism that still afflicts our culture. But I think, even more so, that the practice runs contrary to our particularly American expectations of realism in art. We are the culture that produced Marlon Brando and the Actor’s Studio, after all. These are great achievements, and I’m not saying that colour-blind casting is appropriate, or even desirable, in all cases.
Angel Coulby of Merlin
But still, I find myself liking shows that use colour-blind casting (and not just because I’m a lily-livered liberal). A lot of British shows like the excellent Merlin use it, as did the Victorian-based Sally Lockhart films with Billy Piper (check out Shadow of the North). Colour-blind casting lends itself particularly well to fantasy works, mostly because “realism” doesn’t have much place in such stories. Beyond this, however, flexible casting opens the door to more actors, thus increasing the chances of a serendipitous fit.
Basically, colour-blind casting makes things more interesting.
Which brings me to the new Star Wars movies soon to be in production at Disney. I think the new director, J. J. Abrams, could benefit from colour-blind casting. This seem may seem an odd thing to say, considering that the Star Wars universe is populated with aliens and droids. But think about it. Speculation is already rampant on who will be cast as the children of Han Solo and Princess Leia–characters who will, apparently, figure prominently in the plot. I will not dare to guess who be cast in these roles, but I will bet on one thing: they will be white.
But why should they be? Do they need to be white just because the actors Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford are white? Is that really a good enough reason, especially in a work of art where space ships roar through the vacuum of space and laser blasts travel across the sky slower than bullets? If Abrams were to find a great Chinese or African or Polynesian actor to play one of these parts, why should she be excluded?
Despite grumblings about his pidgin-speaking aliens in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, George Lucas has been impressively open-minded in his casting choices for all six Star Wars films. Everybody remembers the great Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, but Lucas took lots of other chances in his casting. Carrie Fisher was a beautiful girl in 1976, but hardly a typical Hollywood starlet. And Lucas made frequent use of great older actors like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (veterans of countless B horror films cranked out by Hammer Films in the 1960s).
I would argue that Lucas’ off-beat casting choices were part of the reason the original Star Wars worked so well. There was some real chemistry there. Henry James called this “The Alchemy of Art.”
Billy Dee Williams as Lando
Since the announcement from Disney Studios that a new series of Star Wars movies would be coming out in 2015, every nerd and his nerdy grandmother have been talking about what they would like to see in these flicks. And there are some pretty hair-brained opinions, surely. But generally speaking, everyone wants the new series to capture the magic of the original films (especially the original trilogy).
Clearly, Mr. Abrams has taken on a grand responsibility.
But here’s another idea that would I suggest to him: remember that Star Wars is a myth. It’s not just a franchise, or a property, or a guaranteed of summer blockbusters. It’s a myth. Abrams should think in mythic terms when he conceives the new films. Being open to different kinds of actors is one way he can help Star Wars become reborn to a new generation of kids—many of whom are not white.
Once when Steven Spielberg was asked whether he had any film training as a child, he said, “Yeah. I watched The Searchers two hundred times.”
I suggest that Mr. Abrams watch Brook’s The Mahabharata about two hundred times. I think I have.
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