They wouldn’t.
It about an average actor having more difficulty doing it than an extremely good actor would. And, given just how few trans actors are actually out there, I don’t think you’re going to find extremely good trans actors.
“There probably aren’t any [minority] actors good enough to play this role” is the sort of uninformed nonsense that gets you blackface and ScarJo playing a Japanese woman in the live-action adaptation of a Japanese animated series when there are scores of Asian-American actors who could have inhabited that role (I’ll even throw out a famous and popular one: Lucy Liu).
It’s a bullshit excuse that reinforces the existing status quo, which is “consider cis white people for everything first, and if we run out of those, then see about finding someone else”.
I reject your premise on its face.
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This is a derail. Only people who use the phrase “Identity politics” are playing identity politics. People are just trying to live their lives, and they will, and so the world will move on.
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I’d disagree in that being on TV is no longer considered a “demotion” from films. There is so much incredibly good TV out there right now, with some very interesting roles that many film actors are making the transition to (or back to) TV shows. In part it allows for more complex story telling. And the traditional view that doing genre work leads to ghettoization in genre work is out the window, not that such films are being acknowledged by the academy. The Shape of Water won best film last year.
Maybe for some in the audience, Some want good, compelling story telling. And let’s not forget that who is “attractive” changes over time and with the individual.
In that case, cisgendered actors should never play trans roles, because they don’t have the experience to pull it off.
We’re never going to know if they’ll catch the public interest if they’re not given the chance to play those roles. Again, maintaining starring roles for only “conventionally attractive” cisgendered folks is not going to test that - it will continue to reinforce the current, discriminatory set of practices in place. And let’s not forget that this was the precise logic that kept African Americans out of starring roles, that white audiences wouldn’t be able to identify with them (or feel attracted to them) romantically. We actually don’t know if film audiences will embrace or reject, because we haven’t seen it. And on top of that, you do have a greater number of films with trans characters (being played by cisgendered actors), and audiences do seem to be connecting with them. There is no reason why a trans actor can’t play those roles and get the same audience connection.
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But again, plenty of pedestrian actors get roles that audiences love. The entire genre of action films are full of wooden actors or those who over act.
I just can’t agree with your assessment that trans actors just aren’t capable of being extremely good actors. Acting isn’t something that one is born knowing how to do (and if it is, I’d give people who have to constantly live within the system of double consciousness the edge there, not people whose identity is considered the “norm”). Acting is a craft, a skill that can be learned by many kinds of people.
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And it’s not exactly like we’ve even moved on from that, either. Remember Ridley Scott’s explanation for why he had to cast someone like Christian Bale (read: someone white and famous) as Moses – fucking MOSES – in Exodus: Gods and Kings in the year of our lord 2013:
“I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such,” Scott says. “I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”
Every time there’s some kind of bullshit Conventional Wisdom, like “people won’t watch a solo woman action movie” or “black people just can’t carry a mass-market film”, a movie has come along that’s blasted it so completely out of the water that it’s frankly unfathomable that we keep having the same conversation over and over again. (In this context, those movies are Wonder Woman and Black Panther. Throw Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time in there if you want, too.)
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Indeed. And with regards to changing conventional wisdom on attractivenss - who DOESN’T swoon over Idris Elba!
I mean, look at that! But even 30 years ago, he would not have been cast in a big budget film, because “he’s not conventionally attractive”! But… just look at him!!!
What a lovely man!
And in terms of trans actors, how about Jamie Clayton… she’s gorgeous by any measure!
Easily, the best couple on Sense8:
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Damn right to both!
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There are 130,000,000 million people in Japan, and about 20 million Asian Americans, there are only about 1 million transgender people in the US (and I don’t even know how “out” most of those people are). Again, I suggest you don’t have a large pool of actors. In fact, the famous actor you threw out was of Chinese-American heritage, not Japanese as would have been proper for the role.
Ok, to re-emphasize I’ve never said that “trans actors just aren’t capable of being extremely good actors”. I’ve said that extremely good actors are rare, and since trans people are normal people other than being transgender they’re going to be subject to the same distribution of acting talent. Given the tiny number of transgender people who go into acting you’re probably not going to find a possessor of rare acting talent.
And I think you’re contradicting yourself wrt acting talent. If it’s so easy to train a person to be a great actor then why are there so many wooden action stars or popular actors who overact?
Blind people?
Again, Nomi and Neets’ wedding was to die for.
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because the market for poor to mediocre action movies is so large it cannot be entirely cast from the pool of well-trained actors who want to act in those movies so we start diving deeper into the barrel.
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i could go for idris elba if i weren’t married and he happened to be into overweight bi-guys.
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You’re making way too much sense; to some folks, “the free market” is some sort of magical entity which is completely equitable, infallible and free from societal bias.
*chucklez
He is beautiful…
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the market?
not in this life.
name one product of human effort which is.
that IS funny 
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Um…
I’m thinking.
Hold on, gimme a minute… or a few millennia…
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You’d have to be deaf, too. Just listening to him speak is…
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In his real voice, with his natural British accent?
Oh, HELLZ yeah!
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