Is it necessary for an actor to be mixed race to play Stephen Bush? It’s not a question that I ever expected to have to answer, but a couple of months ago I received a phone call from Jonathan Freedland, whose verbatim play, Jews. In Their Own Words, features me as a character. The production wanted an all-Jewish cast but the Royal Court was struggling to find a mixed-race Jewish actor. Would I mind terribly if a Jewish actor who was not mixed race filled the part?
As it happens, the production company was able to find a talented young mixed-race actor called Billy Ashcroft, so my feelings were redundant either way. But the question of who should or could play Stephen Bush on stage is the smallest part of a debate roiling stage and screen the world over about casting.
So-called “colour-blind casting”, in which actors are cast without regard to the race of the roles they are playing, is increasingly in vogue. Netflix’s new adaptation of Persuasion features actors of Malaysian and Nigerian descent playing early 19th-century British aristocrats. In the world of fantasy, the presence of black actors has caused vicious internal debates among fans of Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Marlee Matlin, who stars in Apple TV’s Oscar-winning movie CODA, has insisted that “deaf is not a costume” and has argued that only deaf actors should play deaf roles.
The success of a string of black British actors, such as David Oyelowo and Daniel Kaluuya, playing African-American roles has been criticised by Samuel L Jackson due to the very different recent histories of race and racism in the US and UK. A forthcoming biopic of Golda Meir, Israel’s first female prime minister, has been criticised for the casting of Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, in the role of Meir.
Some of these issues are easier to resolve than others. The worlds of Jane Austen, George RR Martin, JRR Tolkien and George Lucas and do not have a great deal in common, but the most important thing that binds them together is that they are fictional.
When Linda Antonsson, co-author of The World of Ice & Fire, complains that “there are no black Valyrians”, what polite response can there be other than to say that there is no such thing as a Valyrian full stop? Given that to enjoy the ending of Persuasion, one has to turn a blind eye to the very real possibility that the Peninsular war makes a widow of Anne Elliot, while basic economics, geography and, at times, common sense are sometimes absent from the worlds of Star Wars, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. A little bit of ethnic diversity is not going to hurt anyone and complainers should grow up a bit.
Jackson is right to say that the US and UK have very different histories of race and diversity. But ultimately we all have different histories: Ashcroft, who has Jewish and Jamaican heritage is, like me, mixed race, but our ethnic heritages are different, and we’ve led different lives. He does a terrific job playing me on stage because he’s a great actor, not because we would both tick the same category in the UK census. When I hear Jackson speak, I’m irresistibly reminded of Laurence Olivier’s inquiry to Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man: “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”
As so often in life, the debate around casting is missing something because of an unwillingness to talk about the key thing here: money. What really matters is that actors of all ethnicities, classes, ages and genders have enough opportunities to make ends meet. By reserving my role to a mixed-race actor, a young professional was given their stage debut.
Where Matlin is surely right is that a deaf actor cannot play a role as if they were not deaf. If an actor who can hear takes a role playing someone who can’t, they are doing real and measurable economic harm to a deaf actor’s prospects, which goes beyond the usual damage done when one actor beats another to a gig.
The reason why colour-blind casting is a good thing in Austen adaptations or the latest sci-fi or fantasy property is that these productions are essentially the closest the worlds of stage and screen get to a steady job, along with soap operas. If you don’t have casting opportunities that provide diverse roles for actors of different ages, classes and genders in these programmes, you won’t have a very diverse group of actors for long.
And that, perhaps, is what the debate about colour-blind casting most has to teach us: that while talking about shared histories and traumas and the like is easier than talking about cash, if you really care about diversity, ultimately you have to care about economic opportunities. What matters most in ensuring decent representation is a good and reliable salary.
