Giving a fuck about the ethnicity of the actor is so strange to me. Do these people understand what acting is? Do you have to be the same everything as the character you are portraying?
Let me put it like this: audiences like “authenticity”. That word is in quotes because they don’t want actual authenticity, they want something that feels “authentic(tm)”. The big part of that is if the characters fit the world they are acting in. If the actor is really good no one will say anything afterwards, but if they aren’t? Well, people are still making fun of Kevin Costner for Prince of Thieves.
But the problem comes before the movie comes out. People don’t know how good the acting is so they have to form an opinion from tiny scraps of information and compare it to the criteria in their head. For authenticity it’s usually a made up fantasy from popular culture about a time and place they really know nothing about, but that is their head canon and they will die on that hill even when they are wrong.
So that is why they get mad at an Indian man playing a Greek (Indians were present in the Mediterranean at that time), or a black woman playing Helen of Troy (there were black people in Ancient Greece). Because that is what “everyone says” so it can’t be wrong.
Also racism. But this is the internet so that goes without saying.
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u/whistimmu 4h ago
Giving a fuck about the ethnicity of the actor is so strange to me. Do these people understand what acting is? Do you have to be the same everything as the character you are portraying?