Last Updated on February 9, 2017
Actors Van Hansis and Jake Silbermann aren’t a gay couple, but they play one on TV. Actress Cate Blanchett isn’t male, but she played one in a movie. Actor Robert Downey, Jr., isn’t black…
Can you guess where this is going?
Yes, Downey is now portraying a black man in a new motion picture directed by Ben Stiller.
The film, Tropic Thunder, is about a group of actors hired for a movie about Vietnam who find themselves dropped in a real jungle in the middle of a battle they don’t realize is real. Downey plays a black actor.
But it isn’t the same scenario as the 1980s flick Soul Man, in which C. Thomas Howell’s character made himself up as a black man to be able to attend college on a black scholarship; the audience is supposed to assume from the beginning that the character — and presumably the actor portraying him — is indeed black.
A still released ahead of the movie shows the successful make-up job and I suspect that the casual observer would never recognize Downey if they didn’t know who he really was. But fancy disguises aside, the casting is already causing controversy, and Downey has prepared himself for more, according to The Daily Mail, which reports some initial reactions:
“I’m not black and I find it offensive; are there not any talented enough black actors out in the world that they feel the need to hire a white guy to do a black guy?”
“They are infering that there are no good enough black actors to play a black person.”
There were similar reactions in 2006 when producers of CBS’s soap As The World Turns introduced a storyline in which Hansis’s character, Luke, came out to his parents, longtime characters Lily and Holden.
And as the storyline has heated up, including the appearance of a love interest in the form of Silbermann, who plays Noah, so has the controversy.
But in this case, time has changed the direction of the talk, from questioning why the 52-year-old soap couldn’t hire actors who are actually gay to why the show hasn’t allowed the couple more than a single attention-getting kiss. It seems that not only gay fans of the show, but women as well, want to see more sparks between the characters, whom they have nicknamed “Nuke.” (That detail provides men with the answer to a question they’ve wondered for years: apparently there are some women for whom the thought of guy-on-guy action is as appealing as girl-on-girl action is to some men…but I digress.)
Then there was Blanchett, who revealed last year that she strapped down her breasts and “went for it” to portray rock icon Bob Dylan in the biopic I’m Not Here. She was one of seven to play Dylan in the film, and was the only female.
I don’t recall any men complaining about that casting. If anything, I heard that people actually were looking forward to seeing the performance, though I suspect many anticipated it the way a Nascar fan goes to a race anticipating a major pile-up.
Is it reasonable that only black actors should play black characters? Or that only gay actors portray homosexuals? Or even that men can’t play women and vice versa?
I don’t think so. I think different performers can bring different things to the table in a roll. And firsthand familiarity isn’t a necessity for other aspects of an actor. An actor need not kill someone before he can play a murderer on CSI:. An actress isn’t required to cheat on her real-life husband just so she can play an adulterous vixen on Days of Our Lives.
It’s supposed to be about what an actor brings to a role, even when that roll might be a bit of a stretch.  It’s so ridiculous to suggest that a situation like Downey’s is an admission that there are no black actors “good enough” to play a black man that I am amazed anyone would make the argument; how does a black actor “play” black?
The question should be about how a white actor would “play” a black man: I can understand the potential for offense if he were to portray a black man as a jive-talking “brotha” right out of 1970s stereotypes.  It doesn’t appear from what has been said so far that this was the intent in Downey’s case.  But I wonder how many who are protesting will actually go see the film to find out for themselves.
Are any of these scenarios — gender-bending, race-bending or orientation-bending — particularly offensive to you?
