8 Insane Recent Cases Of Hollywood Whitewashing

It's hard to miss the controversy surrounding Hollywood's racial diversity crisis right now. After #OscarsSoWhite - a hashtag cooked up in reaction to the fact that only white actors had been nominated at the Academy Awards for the second year in a row - the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has vowed to clean up its act and diversify. It's about time, especially as Hollywood in some cases appears to be regressing rather than moving forward. There have been recent individual examples of Hollywood getting it wrong - hey, is that Rooney Mara playing a Native American? - that have particularly stick in the craw, but there have also been the cast-wide examples of political in-correctness that can only suitably be described as 'whitewashing.' To 'celebrate' the release of Gods of Egypt, Alex Proyas' fantasy epic that reimagines a state in Northern Africa as populated almost entirely by white people, here are eight recent cases of Hollywood completely whitewashing a movie. 8) 300 300 is a kind of double whammy for racial controversy, in that it takes two separate races of people and seemingly tries its hardest to get them both completely wrong. First, Zack Snyder's movie takes the characters of the Spartans - Greeks - and throws white folks at them until the cast list is entirely Caucasian, with people like Michael Fassbender and Dominic West playing characters named Stelios and Theron. Then, 300 bungles the Spartans' adversaries the Persians too, by making the Persian army mostly white. You do get some diversity, sure, but it's not exactly historically accurate; the emissaries are played by black actors, while the Brazilian Rodrigo Santoro takes on the role of Xerxes, a legendary Persian king. Honestly, it's almost as though the casting director thought nobody would notice and/or care. 7) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time When you think Persia, think Iran. That's the setting of disappointing 2010 video game adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Now, when you think Iran, do you think olive-skinned Arabic peoples, or do you think Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton? If you answered with the latter, you might be in for a shock. Prince of Persia is positively filled with Caucasian, mostly British actors not even trying to pretend they're from the Middle East. In fairness to the film, it does include at least a couple of actors of Asian descent in Ben Kingsley and Darwin Shaw. But then again, it also has Alfred Molina - British actor of Italian and Spanish heritage - as a character named Sheik Amar, because who even cares, right? 6) 21 21 is unique on this list in that its actors play characters who are written on the page as white. They aren't, as in Prince of Persia or 300, characters who by the nature of geography or genetic makeup shouldn't be played by Caucasian stars. The issue is that 21 is based on a true story, involving mostly Asian-American figures, and that that story was rewritten so the characters were white Americans. That's right, in bringing the story to the screen, Hollywood just ignored the fact that the real people of the story were of Asian descent and instead cast Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth as 'Ben Campbell' and 'Jill Taylor'. If anything, this makes 21 potentially the most depressing movie on this list: even at the development stage, the film's makers had zero confidence in getting a film about Asian characters financed, so they just straight up changed the story's DNA in order to improve its commercial prospects. 5) The Passion of the Christ Movies about Jesus Christ rarely get ethnicity right, at least not in the way that experts say it would have gone down. In The Last Temptation of Christ, you got Willem Dafore as Jesus; in Mary, Mother of Jesus, you got Christian Bale in the role. And in The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's gory and morally questionable biblical adap, you get Jim Caviezel on the cross. The whiteness doesn't end with Caviezel, either. Though The Passion of the Christ is set in Nazareth, AKA the Middle East, there's not a single Asian actor on the cast list. The closest you get to diversity in this film is a cast of Italian and Eastern European performers, including the Italian Monica Bellucci and the Romanian Maia Morgenstern. So there you have it, a racist Mel Gibson movie. And who expected that? 4) Aloha You probably heard of the controversy regarding Emma Stone's casting in Aloha, Cameron Crowe's Hawaii-set romantic comedy. But if not, here's a catch-up: one of the film's main characters is a pilot called Allison Ng, who is of Chinese, Native Hawaiian and Swedish descent. Obviously, a great role for an actor with a diverse background. Or, y'know, Emma Stone, the actress Crowe eventually went with. One of the less mentioned controversial elements of Aloha concerns the racial make-up of the entire cast. In reality Hawaii is 70% non-white, and yet the cast is entirely white (you really can't get much whiter than Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and John Krasinski). It's something the Hawaii-set The Descendants was also guilty of four years earlier, but Hollywood was forgiving enough to give that one an Oscar. 3) Exodus: Gods and Kings If, when you imagine ancient Egpyt, you picture the likes of Christian Bale, Aaron Paul and Sigourney Weaver, then you've got it completely wrong. You apparently wouldn't be alone however, as Ridley Scott made his idea of a fully-white Egypt flesh with 2014 biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings. Telling the story of Moses (Bale) and Ramses (Joel Edgerton), Exodus is like biblical epics of old, in that it replaces any and all of the story's people of color with white people. As John Oliver pointed out in Last Week Tonight, Scott's claim that he couldn't cast "Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such" for financial reasons sort of falls apart when you realize that Joel Edgerton is one of the film's stars. 2) The Last Airbender M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender has been described as one of the worst films to come out of Hollywood in recent times. Don't let that fool you though - the film's not just garbage, but inherently racist as well. It's based on the animated series Avatar, where the characters and their customs are influenced by Asian and Inuit culture. Cut to 2010, and Shyamalan has cast white Americans as his heroes, and the British-Asian Dev Patel as the villain. Overall the cast is more diverse than any other on this list, but still loses points for casting native New Zealander Cliff Curtis, Iranian Shaun Toub and Mexican-Indian Summer Bishil, then hoping nobody will notice the difference between any of them. 1) Gods of Egypt Gods of Egypt, or The Exodus Controversy: Part II, is only the latest in the Hollywood whitewashing trend, but for some reason the stir it's caused appears to be eclipsing the scandal surrounding any other recent whitewashed movie. Undoubtedly part of the reason critics want to tear into it is because it's so objectively terrible, but don't let that obscure how offensive the film is. In the place of BME actors in this Egypt-set film, you have the white Danish Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, white Australians Brenton Thwaites and Courtney Eaton, white Scottish Gerard Butler, white English Rufus Sewell, and the African-American Chadwick Boseman, presumably thrown in to avoid accusations of lack of diversity. That line of thinking, evidently, didn't work.