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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out.
You only need one, and I'm sure there's one out there.
For example, I recommended Jameela Jamil
play Faiza Hussain
, mainly because Jameela Jamil is completely delightful in The Good Place and is in the same age range, is the same ethnicity, and even looks like as Faiza. But Faiza is a Pakistani-British citizen, while Jameela is half-Indian, half-Pakistani. Faiza is also Muslim and wears a headscarf, but Jameela isn't Muslim at all.
Does that mean Jameela would be a bad fit for Faiza Hussain? Nope, it just means that sometimes you sacrifice the 1-to-1 similarities for a person you know would do a great job with the role.
And Jameela Jamil would absolutely kill in that role.
Edited by alliterator on Jan 26th 2019 at 9:08:55 AM
Right, but then again, they don't specify an actual ethnicity. They only say "Asian-American." Is the character supposed to be Japanese-American, Chinese-America, Korean-American? So the casting call is actually less specific in some regards, while more specific in others.
I'll give a different example: when casting Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna wanted the love interest to be an "Asian bro" which they named Josh Chang. The actor they eventually hired was Vincent Rodriguez III, who was Filipino-American, so they changed the character's last name to "Chan" instead of "Chang," since that fit more with Filipino ancestry. In fact, after they settled on his ethnicity, they decided to get a lot of things right about the Filipino culture
. But before they cast him, they didn't yet have a specific ethnicity and instead built it around the actor's own.
You can't exactly do that with characters you are adapting from other works, because those characters come attached to ethnicities already, mostly. The only thing you can do is hope you find someone who fits, but, again, the more specific you get, the smaller the audition pool is going to be. (Even Crazy Ex-Girlfriend did this when casting Josh Chan's family — his mother is played by the amazing Amy Hill
, who has Japanese and Finnish ancestry, even while everyone else in his family are played by Filipino-American actors.)
Edited by alliterator on Jan 26th 2019 at 9:37:11 AM
I find it a bit silly trying to make some manner of hard rule on this as it is the kind of stuff that can only really be judged on a case-by-case basis.
Sometimes the casting lucks out and they find someone that's a 1:1 of the character, other times they have to accept that practicality won't budge from the seat next to the biscuits; most of the time you end up having to compromise somewhere.
Personally, I think Marvel should go the whole nine yards with Kamala Pokedex Nº115, her being one of the biggest new characters to come out of Marvel Comics and just having a lot of cultural significance in today's Usonian society.
Edited by HailMuffins on Jan 27th 2019 at 1:15:07 PM
I suspect that they will do the same they did with Tom Holland and make a wide call for a young talent anyway. Which limits their options from the get go, because they need to find someone with enough raw talent that she can already carry a movie at this age and stack up against seasoned actors. That is not easy to do.
Researching the technology to revive our future overlord Walt Disney?
Someone's religious persuasion should in no way be any reason to not cast them if they're part of the ethnic group. Even if we put aside the continued and kind of uncomfortable assumption that there can't be any good actresses who are both Pakistani and Muslim, religion is an aspect of practice and tradition, whereas culture group is something you represent by birth for better or for worse.
The appeal to casting a Pakistani actress in the role of Kamala is that it gives representation to a overlooked culture group. Also casting a Muslim would be a plus, but because the ethnic representation is such an inherent in the person being cast it absolutely should not be a dealbreaker. And plus, because religion is after all a matter of practice it would actually be better for the director or writers to be Muslim than all of the actors and actresses, because they're the one ensuring that the characters and the setting are respectful to that practice.
And either way, throwing out the need of cultural representation because "wait, she'd have the be Muslim too" is - to be frank - an excuse, and poor one at that.
This kind of logic tends to always be problematic - "well, we're going to cast by what's convenient, because we can easily assume that there's certainly not any competent actors in the culture group we need" - and I primarily remember it being used by Hollywood and fans as an excuse to cast white actors and actresses in nonwhite coded roles (like in the ATLA movie, or Dragonball Evolution). It was fallacious then, and its fallacious now. Not to mention patronizing and actually somewhat insulting to the group being discarded.
And what's more, it's exactly the sort of thing the character of Kamala Khan was made against.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 27th 2019 at 9:23:08 AM
Kamala was made against an environment where Pakistani and Middle Eastern people were portrayed through a hostile social lens, and where characters who represented Pakistani culture and ethnicity, were respectful in that portrayal, and proud of that respectful representation were unheard of, even taboo.
Yes, not casting Pakistani actors and actresses was part of that. Yes, making excuses not to have brown actors and actresses in roles that may have been built for them was part of that, as a primary way to facilitate the former. So yes, doing the latter to try and justify doing the former would be exactly against the kind of problems that the character was made to overcome in the first place.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 27th 2019 at 9:43:47 AM
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Psst. You'll want to make sure you use Pakistani, not Paki. The latter is a slur in the UK and many Commonwealth countries.
No worries, you didn't know.
I just don't really see why there's so much pushback to even trying. Yes, it might be a little more difficult. But this is the star of your movie, this is the face of all that it represents — why not go to a little extra trouble?
Edited by Unsung on Jan 27th 2019 at 10:45:36 AM
Casting issues, while correlating to what we see in general media, don't really come into comic book creation, because you can cast whoever you want in a comic book, it's up to the writers and artists. Saying that "Kamala Khan was made to push back against all-white casting decisions" is a narrowing of the reason she was created and just plain wrong.
Edited by alliterator on Jan 27th 2019 at 9:46:45 AM
I wouldn't.
If Kamala isn't going to be an unusually sympathetic portrayal of the Pak-American experience, then what's the point of even doing a movie about her? If the options are "No Ms. Marvel film" or "A movie about Camilla Conover, the white-as-snow redhead with stretchy powers who fangirls over Captain Marvel", I'd rather just not have the movie, thanks.
If you aren't going to do it right, then there isn't a point in doing it at all.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 27th 2019 at 10:46:12 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Comic writers aren't idiots, and they don't live under rocks. They know full well that the things they're trying to combat in the comics industry are a microcosm of things that are present in media and society in general.
None of them are going to go "these social issues I'm dealing with are all well in good in print, but they cease to matter once these characters leave the comic format."
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 27th 2019 at 9:51:16 AM
