George takei as literally everyone–id buy that on bluray 
I’m fine with your plan as long as Chris Tucker stays in forced retirement.
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I get your point Mindysann33–I was just kidding.
I agree with you, but,
Here is Paul Mooney from The Chappelle Show–he disagrees with you!
Hermione was always a person of color though. The movies just tricked people into their (white) expectations.
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It seems more accurate to say that it wasn’t specified. She had curly brown hair, but so do lots of white people. There are many times when people who were much more clearly black or gay have been depicted as heterosexual white people in film though.
J.K. Rowling has been tweeting fan pics of dark skinned Hermione’s this week so it has author support. 
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Sure, it’s just that it only had her explicit support after a black person was cast in that role. Which as I’ve said, is more than fine with me (even if she had been described as blond and blue eyed in the books).
Can Idries Elba play Snape?
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Yes, he can play all the parts.
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I love Paul Mooney… I mean, I really just want to do it, because it would piss off some white folks. 
Idris Elba for ALL THE THINGS!
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As a liberal and progressive I am a big supporter of the LGBT community, but who or what in the he** is this.
A movie, Being John Malkovich. It is a funny, strange film. I recommend it.
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I agree that ethnicity should play no role in character roles–after all we are all related and literally distant cousins of each other.
“Star Wars” just set a box office record—and one of the lead characters was a black storm trooper, British actor John Boyega. Some were outraged when he was announced.
Star Wars sets record: one billion dollars
That skit of Paul Mooney just cracks me up–no wonder he was the main writer and close friend for the late Richard Pryor.
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What if the character is specifically written as a certain ethnicity?
It is hard to have a movie about a troubled SS commander in WWII and make him black.
It is hard to have a movie about a twisted Klansman and cast a Chinese actor.
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I would say that that is a superficial take on ethnicity. The craft of acting is largely about the skill of portraying people who are unlike one’s self. Whereas the accidents of one’s birth, ancestry, and bodily appearance are not any sort of talents or skills. I am interested in what people choose to do, not in their inherited relationships.
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Of course you would. Others are going to disagree, which is why there are ethnic roles in media, including books, and people are simply described with no attributes.
I really doubt you go to see many movies.
People lacking attributes is not the same as avoiding stereotypes. That’s precisely the difficulty - the more stereotyped the roles are, the more we are left with gross caricature instead of personal attributes. Also, as I have pointed out elsewhere, such practices cultivate a blind-spot in people where they become truly unaware of their own ethnicity, and instead presume that they comprise a neutral “default” of cultural perception. This is how we get the stilted and improbable assertions that some special clothes, foods, media constructs are somehow “ethnic”, whilst others are merely “normal”. People who can honestly acknowledge that each person is of some ethnicity - including themselves - are probably going to be more sensitive to how ethnicity is depicted.
Not as many as I used to, but I do still watch some. I can appreciate them for what they are and still watch them critically.
ETA: And to preserve some semblance of topicality - I have been typing this while topless.
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Hmmm… it shouldn’t have played a role in much of history, but it did. If you want to tell an honest story involving the Nazis, but want to be colour blind in your casting, you’ve already failed. On the other hand, you can put Pride and Prejudice in modern day India or Sherlock Holmes in modern day London with a female Watson, so to that extent I’d agree that you have a lot of latitude to change major elements of a story to fit a different strategy. Often this can highlight parallels between very different cultures or challenge our cultural assumptions (which can be reinforced by hearing the same tropes again and again). At a certain point though, it’s just a different story (especially when you’re retelling history rather than fiction).
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You make a good point about historical movies.
