How do you feel about white actors "blacking up" for a role?
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Replying to @clipperride @Recursion_Agent
'Blacking up' is a form of offensive pantomime; it's not mimetic but parodic. Was it offensive when Fred Armisen portrayed Barack Obama on SNL? What about the race-scrambling in Cloud Atlas (which would be literally impossible under the new rules)?
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Replying to @St_Rev @Recursion_Agent
I guess there is a big difference between USA and UK here. I haven't seen SNL so can't comment (apart from some old Blues Brothers clips) Plenty of old films have white actors playing non-white roles with no intentional parody.
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Replying to @clipperride @Recursion_Agent
A lot of bad race-portrayal comes from a combination of contempt (eg minstrelry, also a lot of Asian stereotypes in 30s cinema) and plain incompetence (John Wayne as Gengis Khan?) But obviously pretending is at the root of *all* acting, it's ridiculous to ban it all.
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Replying to @St_Rev @Recursion_Agent
I agree that a ban is completely unnecessary, but I would like to see disabled characters played by someone with the disability when ever that is possible.
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Replying to @clipperride @Recursion_Agent
It's not possible for starring roles, full stop.
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An actor is someone whose main professional skill is convincingly appearing to be someone else. An actor with an obvious disability is going to be restricted in the number of roles they can convincingly play. This has severe reputational consequences.
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And starring roles are going to go to actors with tons of reputational capital, because they have fans and sell tickets. Note that the calculus is *completely different* for people with invisible disabilities/differences. Hollywood's always had gay stars.
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Yeah, Dinklage got a supporting role in a weird fringey sci-fi show and a) the show blew up and b) he was the best thing about it. That's lightning in a bottle, though.
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Another way to express the problem that's perhaps more compact: Every actor fears typecasting, for good reason; a visibly disabled/different actor is almost unavoidably typecast. You can make a career out of that in supporting roles, but not leading ones.
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Replying to @St_Rev @unorthodoxxxy and
I think to an extent (and much like many other current problems in Hollywood), this could be solved with better writing.
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Maybe it's that typecasting I'm objecting to. Why should the "hero" always be, what we currently consider, perfect?
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.