Cliff Curtis, Ben Kingsley and Racial Politics of casting

Shohat and Stam state how dominant cinema (Hollywood) is notorious for using non-white actors as interchangeable units that are able to stand in for one another. I agree with this statement and use the examples of actors Cliff Curtis and Ben Kingsley to demonstrate this. Both Kingsley and Curtis have generated a pretty good career playing roles of numerous races. Kingsley has played Jewish (Schindler’s List), Indian (Gandhi), Iranian (House of Fog), Israeli (Exodus: Gods and Kings), Egyptian (Tut) and Maori (Ender’s Game) to name a few. Cliff Curtis has played Colombian (Blow), Latino (Training Day), Iraqi (Three Kings), African American (Bringing out the Dead) and even Indian (A Thousand Words). A similar trait that both these actors have is they predominantly represent races that are not their own. They have however represented each other’s races such as Kingsley in Ender’s Game and Curtis in A Thousand words.

 

  These two actors help reinforce Shohat and Stams’s argument on racial politics in casting and also demonstrate how they are predominantly confined to playing only ethnic roles and specifically only roles that they deem passable in terms of the colour of their skin. Shohat and Stam pont out that even a drop of black blood (in this case brown blood) is enough to disqualify one from representing whites. Interestingly, Kingsley changed his name from Krishna Bhanji once he gained a reputable reputation as a stage actor for fear that his traditional name would hinder his career prospects.

Whites in dominant cinema are not bound by ethnicity to determine roles and as Shohat and Stam argue, they are seen as beyond ethnicity. This is demonstrated through Hollywood cinema with an example being how Jim Sturgess and Hugo Weaving were able to don yellow face to pass off as Asians in the film Cloud Atlas.

 Although the film received criticism, it doesn’t change the fact that this happened in the first place, that it has happened before and continues to happen. This not only takes roles away from minority artists but it also (as Shohat & Stam point out) shows the idea that minorities are not capable of representing themselves. That whites can deliver a more convincing job and therefore they are cast ahead of minority actors to represent a culture not their own.