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FiTV: Best actors

This summer, more and more discussions have come up regarding the casting of actors for certain roles. These announcements used to help drum up excitement for a new project. But now, in some cases, it’s all but undermining production.
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This summer, more and more discussions have come up regarding the casting of actors for certain roles.  These announcements used to help drum up excitement for a new project.  But now, in some cases, it’s all but undermining production.

Scarlett Johansson was proud to be cast as a transgender man for the film Rub & Tug.  However, LGBTQ groups were incensed that a woman would be cast when there are many transgender actors who could play the role with more authenticity.  With so much pressure, Johansson withdrew from the film which is now at a stand-still.

More recently, it was announced that Jack Whitehall would play Disney’s first openly gay character in the movie Jungle Cruise.  Unfortunately, this caused immediate backlash too – not because the character is gay, but because Whitehall, himself, is not.

It’s a similar argument that actors with disabilities have been making.  Why hire someone who can walk for a wheelchair role when a wheelchair-bound actor could portray it more honestly?  Why hire a hearing/sighted actor to play deaf/blind?

I get it.  Those with obvious physical cues to their personal differences find it harder to get even smaller roles.  For casting directors, it adds financial costs and logistical difficulties to the production (lighting, camera angles, costuming, physical layouts of the set, special assistants, even insurance coverage) to include a character in a wheelchair or with any special physical needs. 

So unless the disability is essential to the story, producers won’t include it.  And because of these barriers, they are greatly under-represented in television and movies.

But Scarlett Johansson’s casting wasn’t to save money.  She was hired to make money.  Her skill as an actress got her the job.  However, her star-power name was going to get audiences to buy tickets.

This is often the case for anyone trying to break into the business.  Past jobs get actors auditions, not past personal experiences.  It’s a role.  It’s up to the writers to make the dialogue and the story authentic. 

It’s up to the actor to bring someone else’s story, someone else’s experience, to life.  Nobody questioned Jodie Foster’s Academy Award for The Accused because she hadn’t personally been gang-raped in a bar with patrons watching. 

Nobody had a problem with proudly-out Neil Patrick Harris re-energizing his career playing a womanizing straight guy on How I Met Your Mother. 

Should Gary Sinese have hacked off a leg part way through production of Forrest Gump for authenticity?  Or should they have hired a partial amputee and used a computer-generated leg for the first half of the film?

Claiming that only someone in a wheelchair should be hired for a wheelchair role – or that gays should play gays or that trans should be play trans – suggests that these personal differences are more important than the actor. 

Yes, they’re certainly an integral part of that person.  But actors are not hired to be themselves.  They’re hired to become as someone else.  So their personal experiences aren’t as all-important as they think.

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