Racebending in Cinema

To be fair, it’s not as if racebending is completely limited to whites playing originally non-white characters. Perhaps the most famous example of a black man playing a white character is the casting of Morgan Freeman as the Irishman “Red” in the movie version of Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.”

The 1965 version of Shakespeare’s classic is proof Lawrence Olivier wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way of playing every single one of the Bard’s leads. And sure, it was a different time.

Until 2008, it was called white-washing or race-lifting. Then Hollywood’s most prominent ethnically-Indian director took a popular ethnically-diverse cartoon and cast a whole bunch of white people.

Recently hundreds of people took to twitter to express their anger at the character of Rue in The Hunger Games being portrayed by a black actress.

No one said no to John Wayne at the top of his game, not even Howard Hughes. That is why Wayne ended up completely miscast in the worst movie of his career, and one of the worst movies of all time according to various polls.

Before The Last Airbender, the biggest racebending controversy of the decade was probably over Angelia Jolie playing the character of mixed-race French journalist Mariane Pearl, who was five months pregnant when her husband Daniel was abducted by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.

Interracial marriage has been legal in the US for 45 years, but that doesn’t mean people are exactly comfortable with the idea yet. And in many countries abroad, countries that contribute a lot to a movie’s overall profits, interracial relationships are even more frowned upon.