Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/10/yet-another-white-guy-cast-in.html
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He is an odd looking dude too.
He looks hella high as all get out.
Auē nohoʻi! Aʻohe mea hana keaka Kanaka Maoli? Ua make ana lākou ā pau? Ka hoʻomaikaʻi aku nei au iā Lāʻaukāwaʻu* i kō lākou ʻaʻapo i ka pono.
Meaning roughly: Geez! Are there no Native Hawaiian actors? Did all of them die? I send blessings to Hollywood that they may quickly learn to live in harmony and balance.
And I wish them good luck (not really) in finding a Hawaiian language coach. I can’t see anybody qualified collaborating on this.
*As far as I know, there is no Hawaiian place name for Hollywood, so I just combined lāʻau (wood) and kāwaʻu (holly).
Why is this crap still going on? Seriously, what the hell?
No real excuse for this. The guy is not an A list actor which might drive box office sales, and they are filming on location where they could easily recruit locals.
Not that the A list actor thing is a good excuse to start with. A list stars of color have to get into films first to become A list.
If The Expanse could find a 6-foot buff Polynesian actress to play Bobbie Draper, a full-budget Hollywood movie has no excuse.
Obviously the only good solution here is to rename the character to “Ben Cane” and rewrite it so he’s now an aging surfer from Iowa. Problem solved! Alt-History!
You think any B or C-list actor is going to turn down a role outside their race?
It’s either play a Pacific Islander, or that cat food commercial your agent was pitching.
That said, obviously casting agents need to do better job for this kind of thing. You wouldn’t put a white guy in black-face, so . . . .
Perhaps you might have heard, Americans hate non-white people so much they elected a mentally challenged clown to run the country just because he’s racist.
Here you go, Hollywood, Cedric Jonathan. Now, was that so hard? Braddah also dance hula in one of the top men’s groups in Hawaiʻi Nei.
Straight to a streaming service.
You’ll never believe it - they got a non-white guy in a white starring role.
Apparently their regular go-to guy has a lot on his plate right now.
Ooof. Usually there’s at least SOMETHING defensible about these choices these days–like when they cast whatshername as “Tiger Lily” in the latest Peter Pan. (Theoretically defensible in that that character was originally so balls-to-the-wall racist that casting a Native American in the role would potentially be even more insulting than turning her into a post-racial MPDG.)
But a straight-up historical drama about a real person? Yikes. Did they cast a white dude as the Japanese pilot, too?
What about Danial Logan? He’s of Māori descent, which is aways from Hawaii, but closer than Europe.
I was gonna say, seriously, Hollywood, go to any luau show in Maui or Oahu. You will have so many incredibly muscular, sexy looking, charismatic native Hawaiian guys to choose from. You don’t have to just cast The Rock or a white dude.
Is it just me or did it get warm in here?
It worked well when he was on Black Sails as the dread pirate Charles Vane.
To me he looked like a Baldwin brother whose head was caught in an industrial press.