Black Vikings / Film

• Pictured above is The Norseman, a 1978 film that features the late Deacon Jones as an African thrall (a.k.a. slave). Which, by itself, isn't really that egregious. Vikings would enslave some captives of any race as thralls, and sometimes freed thralls would become Vikings themselves. If there were any historical black Vikings, this is how it could've happened, albeit there is no existing evidence for them.
• A Kid in King Arthur's Court had black people fully integrated into a Theme Park Version of King Arthur's court with no explanation given whatsoever (though considering the King Arthur of popular culture is a myth, this can be excused).
• Moors in the Merry Men of Robin Hood, something introduced with the character of Nasir in ITV's Robin of Sherwood, and subsequently taken up in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Azeem, and the latest series from The BBC (not to mention Achoo in Men in Tights). The BBC version takes this trend a step further, as there is at least one black character working for the Sheriff, and a black thief is taken seriously when she claims to be the leader of an order of nuns; unlike the Arabic characters, the black characters are portrayed as fully accepted members of medieval English society.
• The live-action version of Beauty and the Beast (2017) has a number of black people at the Prince's party. While the black singer is possible, though unlikely, in 18th Century France, black courtiers (the dancers) are pretty unlikely - though not impossible, as was demonstrated by Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (father of Alexandre Dumas), a mixed-race general during the French Revolutionary Wars towards the end of the 18th century.
• In the feature film adaption of Wild Wild West, Will Smith, a black man, is cast as the protagonist, James West, a U.S. Army officer in 1869. The first post-war black U.S. Army officer, Henry O. Flipper, was commissioned on his graduation from West Point in 1877. This is perhaps excusable given that the film also features a giant mechanical tarantula, so it's clearly operating on Rule of Cool rather than aiming for any sort of historical accuracy.
• Both averted and played straight in Black Knight (2001). When Martin Lawrence travels to medieval England and becomes a Fish out of Temporal Water, he is called a "Moor" in a disrespectful tone and runs into conflict a few times because of his skin color. Yet when he arrives at the castle there is a black chambermaid there and nobody seems to care. It was all just a dream anyway.
• In Much Ado About Nothing (1993), the character Don Pedro is the Prince of Aragon and played by Denzel Washington. It might have been a stylish choice to make his illegitimate brother's deep hatred for him more obvious.
• Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet has a few black people among the staff of the Danish castle, including one woman who was originally a "gentleman" in the play. The film updates the time period to somewhere in the 1800s, but that doesn't change much. Although it would have been slightly less likely in the 16th century since the Virgin Islands were a Danish colony until the Great War.
• M*A*S*H, set during the Korean War, featured a black surgeon. The TV show followed suit for a few episodes until the anachronism was pointed out to the producers. While ostensibly set in the 1950s, M*A*S*H was ultimately pretty much a mix of Vietnam War and (then-) Present-Day Past, anyway. Presumably, the producers never bothered to check any sources about the 8055th MASH, the real unit in Korea the movie was based on, which did have a black surgeon on staff (the U.S. Army wasn't fully integrated until 1954, one year after the Korean conflict ended, but piecemeal integration had occurred in the 1940s and even earlier).
• Force 10 from Navarone does its best to avert this trope and use it too. Carl "Apollo Creed" Weathers unknowingly forces his way into the middle of a plane full of commandos flying to Yugoslavia to fight the Nazis. The frustrated commandos immediately point out how much Weathers will stick out in Yugoslavia, complete with a snide comment about a Zulu invasion. When they land, the leader of the native force they join up with is bemused by his appearance to the point of pretending to wipe the blackness off of Weathers' face.
• German actor Günther Kaufmann, whose father was an African-American GI, plays a Viking in Wickie und die starken Männer (Wickie and the Strong Men) — a Live-Action Adaptation of Vicky the Viking, thus making this a very literal example of this trope. With heavy makeup, Kaufmann's actual ethnicity is hard to tell though.
• In a version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat released on DVD, two of the brothers (Judah and Benjamin) are played by black actors. This is something of a continuity problem as the two were born to different mothers, according to Genesis. The other ten brothers are pretty much all over the apparent ethnicity map (the twelve had the same father, who had four wives). And Joseph's father Jacob did have concubines who may have been of different ethnicities than his two wives, who were sisters. Jacob having had black sons is not impossible. On the other hand, Benjamin is supposed to be the full brother of Joseph. In any case, that particular version is a comedy.
• In the 1973 film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas is black. Some critics saw the casting as racist, but the filmmakers insisted that Carl Anderson was simply the best man for the role (Ben Vereen faced similar criticism for playing the role on Broadway, and Anderson was in fact his understudy). Jesus, meanwhile, is white, Mary Magdalene is Hawaiian, and the other disciples are all different races (but then again, the film makes no pretense at realism).
• In a flashback in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, The Fallen is attacked by various native ancient Africans. Among these native Africans is a white man.
• Eartha Kitt as Freya the Norn in Erik the Viking. The casting helps portray her as somewhat "other" from the rest of the tribe, and it helps that she's light-skinned to begin with.
• 300 features quite a few high-ranking black members of the Persian Empire, implying that a significant population of the elites in Persia were black. The Persian Empire under Xerxes I only held a small portion of modern-day Egypt and so did not have any large population of Sub-Saharan Africans, particularly among its elites. Of course, their army is also portrayed as including monsters of various kinds, so it's not really realistic, and this is told by an Unreliable Narrator who may have exaggerated things. This is oddly enforced from a meta perspective as some characters had their skin darkened in postproduction, so for example the white actor Rodrigo Santoro (who is of Italo-Portuguese descent and could easily pass for Iranian) ends up looking like a Scary Black Man as Xerxes.
• There's a whole Friendly Local Chinatown in Gangs of New York, and half the story is set in a Chinese cathouse, to which historians were quick to point out that the Chinese population of New York was virtually nonexistent at the time.
• Played for laughs in Woody Allen's Love and Death, with a shouting black drill sergeant in 1812 Russia.
• In Kingdom of Heaven, Liam Neeson's character Godfrey leads a small rainbow coalition of warriors back from the Crusades, one of whom is a black man. It's supposed to indicate how so many different cultures have been drawn to the fight over the Holy Land. It's not completely impossible since there were Orthodox Christians from Ethiopia and Nubia.
• Captain America: The First Avenger: The Howling Commandos includes a Japanese-American and two African-Americans fighting with white soldiers before the American military fully desegregated. It's understandable since the squad is a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits formed from a group of POWs and handpicked by a superhero who couldn't care less about trivial things like races and nationalities, and even then Dum Dum Dugan does, albeit briefly, take little offense to letting Jim Morita come with them.
  Dum Dum: What, are we taking everybody?
  Jim: I'm from Fresno, Ace!
• Catherine Called Birdy (2022): Rural 13th-century England is much more diverse than it would be in real life. For example, several supporting characters (such as Meg, Finneas, Ethelfritha, and Berenice) are played by Black British actors. A handful of the suitors are men of color as well, though some of them are mentioned to be in trade.
• Queen Latifah as Mama Morton in the movie Chicago. A female African-American jail warden in charge of white prisoners in 1920s America? That wouldn't happen.
• In Christopher And His Kind, there is at least one black man in the gay club Isherwood frequents. Given that this happened in early 1930s Berlin, it is a little jarring, though possible.
• Kenneth Branagh's version of As You Like It has a lot of white, black, and Japanese actors. You may be noticing he tends to do this a lot.
• In the 2004 musical TV special of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present is played by Afro-American actor Jesse L. Martin (though the character is an abstract spirit in Scrooge's dream, which is less jarring than if he was an ordinary guy in Victorian London). Ditto for theater productions using colourblind casting.
• Parodied in The Hooligan Factory with Midnight, stated to be "the original black hooligan. Actually, I think back in the day he was the only black hooligan."
• Dogma plays the trope for laughs by introducing a thirteenth apostle of Jesus, who was left out of the Bible because he's black.
• Centurion features Noel Clarke, an English actor with Afro-Caribbean heritage playing "Macro", a refugee from Numidia and a legionary from the second cohort of the Ninth Legion. Schoolboy error here, Numidia in modern-day Tunisia was populated by light/olive-skinned Berbers and descendants of the Semitic Carthaginians. The writer probably meant Nubia, the country in modern-day Sudan and Egypt. The same Roman unit also features Riz Ahmed playing Tarak, the company cook, who "hails from the Hindu Kush", which neatly matches Ahmed's own Pakistani ancestry. The latter is a subversion since the Hindu Kush had contact with the Parthian Empire which fought the Romans twice, so it isn't entirely implausible for a local to end up in a Roman legion without stretching too much the limits of disbelief.
• King Arthur: Legend of the Sword: The film doesn't even attempt to be historically accurate, so there are a few non-European characters around, including Bedivere, who is given a Race Lift and played by Djimon Hounsou, Wetstick, who appears to be mixed race, and a character called Kung Fu George, who is Asian. While non-white people did wind up in medieval England after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it's highly unlikely that ancient London was nearly this cosmopolitan.
• The Scorpion King: The racial makeup of the cast is, shall we say, a bit odd for Ancient Egypt, what with the half-Samoan Dwayne Johnson playing an Akkadian (of course, the film's Akkadians seem to have virtually nothing in common with the actual Akkadians) and Kelly Hu (a mix of English, Chinese, and Native Hawaiian) playing a character with the Greek name of Cassandra.
• Ophelia: The film is set in Denmark in the Middle Ages, yet a few of the courtiers are played by actors of color. Most notably, Horatio is portrayed by Devon Terrell, who has mixed ethnicity (his father is African-American and his mother is Anglo-Indian). Then again, most modern performances/adaptations of Shakespeare plays tend to have colorblind casting, so that may be the intention here.
• Pagan Warrior is set in England in 812, and has a black Saxon woman and a Mediterranean-looking Saxon queen. No explanation is offered for this in-story. Given the film's obviously tiny budget, the most likely reason is that the actors were known to the creators, and were willing to make up the numbers.
• Dudley Moore's comedy film Wholly Moses! presents Egyptians as Sub-Saharan Africans (the Pharaoh is the great Richard Pryor), a controversial topic on its own, especially back then, however as is a comedy this might be intentional.
• Inverted in Mulan: Rise of a Warrior, where the king of the Rouran Khaganate has a white court musician (played by Russian-Latvian singer Vitas). It's not too implausible given that Northern Asia and Eastern Europe are side by side and Chinese historical accounts referenced giants with red hair and green or blue eyes. Furthermore, parts of Western China (modern Xinjiang) were inhhabited by Tocharians, a Nordic-looking and Indo-European speaking people.
• The Personal History of David Copperfield uses deliberately colour-blind casting, allowing characters who were implicitly white to be played by actors of a variety of different backgrounds regardless of their role. The protagonist is played by Dev Patel, the Wickfield father-daughter duo are played by Benedict Wong and a black woman, and Ham is played by a black man.
• With a Kiss I Die: Juliet, a medieval Italian noblewoman, is black here. While not impossible, it would have been unlikely for a noble Veronese family like Capulets to be of African descent. This isn't commented on in the film.
• The Green Knight: Camelot is filled with people of Asian and African descent, probably to justify the Race Lifts of various Arthurian characters, most notably Gawain himself, played by Dev Patel.
• The Name of the Rose: Brother Venantius, the Greek scholar and translator, is played by half-Nigerian Swiss actor Urs Althaus and called "the black monk" by main character William of Baskerville at one point. However it is never questioned, nor is any explanation given to why a black man ended in such position at a remote Alpine monastery in the 14th century.