It’s time to stop whitewashing Asians off the big screen
Kelly Yang warns that Tilda Swinton and Emma Stone playing Asian characters is part of a vicious cycle: fewer Asian characters get written, fewer Asians are inspired to become actors, and fewer Asian actors are available to play Asian roles
My jaw dropped recently when I saw the trailer for the Disney/Marvel movie Doctor Strange, in which Tilda Swinton plays the Ancient One, a male Tibetan mystic in the original Marvel comics. Tilda Swinton, the White Witch from The Chronicles of Narnia – really? That’s the best Hollywood could do for an Asian character?
I’m not a big comic book fan, but come on. We have #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OscarsSoWhite. The culmination of such campaigns is diverse characters. Yet, when these diverse characters get whitewashed when they get to the movie stage, we go right back to square one.
Has Doctor Strange sparked another race controversy in Hollywood?
And this is exactly what keeps happening. While Asians make up 36 per cent of the employees of Facebook, in the movie The Social Network, the only Asians I saw were the women who fooled around with Mark Zuckerberg and his friends.
Last year, in the movie Aloha, Cameron Crowe cast Emma Stone as Chinese-American Allison Ng. And just this week, we have newly released pictures of Scarlett Johansson trying to look as Japanese as possible as Motoko Kusanagi in the upcoming film Ghost in the Shell, based on the beloved Japanese anime. ScreenCrush reported that the producers even considered using digital tools to make Johansson look more Asian. Here’s an idea – if you want a character to look more Asian, get an Asian.
As a writer, I’m very distressed by this because, essentially, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I worry that if this sort of Asian whitewashing in Hollywood continues, over time, Asian writers will write fewer Asian characters.
