Colorblind Casting Quotes

We did a black 'Julius Caesar' in which the predominant accent was Caribbean. This offends many people, you know. I also had a Chinese Marc Anthony. I also managed - this caused a great shock - I also got some white guys in it as well!

Simultaneously, the movie business now experiments with a colorblind approach to casting.

I'm not going to change the world overnight. It's one person at a time, and hopefully they're people in positions of power who can help people get in those roles and really, truly embrace colorblind casting.

I get that people want more diversity in TV and film, and I stand by that. I stand in solidarity with better diversity in TV shows, especially for Asian actors. I agree with that 100 per cent.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

Sooner or later, directors in Germany will start casting without regard to where a person is from. It shouldn't matter anymore.

'Black cinema' I don't even know what that means. It's just cinema. When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, we don't just say it's 'white cinema.'

When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I think that a lot of actors of color have said that it's a wonderful thing to play a role that doesn't have a race and that is kind of open to any sort of interpretation. I completely understand that, but at the same time, I just want Asian characters that are well-written.

Iris is the Lois Lane of 'The Flash.' It's a really special role. Knowing they were willing to offer it to an African American - Iris is traditionally white - I knew how important this would be for so many people.

I don't understand labels. I don't need anybody to tell me I'm Latina or black or anything else. I've played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening.

Why aren't there films being made that tell ethnically diverse stories? Or why is it so impossible to allow a person of color to add their texture and their essence to a role that is not ethnically specific? I don't know why it's a novel or risky idea to consider making a film look like how our world actually looks today.

There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.

Studio heads seem to be getting the message that there is not only an audience out there, but there is a desire for people to see people of colour in central roles and in authoritative roles.

Far too often scripts are being written with race in mind, but the subject matter doesn't lend itself to any conversation on race. I applaud Jesse [Zwick] for having the courage to say, this [About Alex] just a story about friends, and they could be anyone. There's no specific color that forces a relationship to be discussed in any other manner.

If you think about 'Person of Interest' with Taraji P. Henson or 'Scandal' with Kerry Washington - any of those black women could have been any race; they just happen to be black. And those are the characters that I'm more attracted to. It's not so much about separation of race, but really, more uniting us.

There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?

I've been extremely lucky in that I've been able to play roles that are not defined by their ethnicity. But that's not a common thing for people of ethnic minorities.

In 'Hamilton,' we're telling the stories of old, dead white men, but we're using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience.

There's racist casting, and there is normal casting. Normal casting, to me, is a process that strives for representation and, in many cases, strives to simply portray the world as it actually is instead of as falsely non-inclusive. And sadly, sometimes that involves removing the whitewash that exists on history.

For a while, I was feeling like I was always playing characters that weren't specifically Korean or specifically Asian, even - that they were characters who were originally written white, and then they would cast me. And I used to consider that a badge of honor because that meant I had avoided stereotypes.

Shonda Rhimes has figured it out, of getting multiracial casts on television and appealing to everybody.

People in the industry thought it was laughable that I should be going up for things that didn't clearly state what race the part was intended for.

I played Pierre, a white Russian aristocrat, and my co-lead was Denee Benton. Two black leads playing not black people - it was an important moment for the Broadway community to say diversity is possible and it's here.

Eventually we got to a point where 'Riverdale' came along, and it was a character that was originally written white, and I saw this as an opportunity to take a classic American character and make them Asian.