The 10 Most Uncomfortable Performances By Actors Playing A Different Race
Agony is skin deep.
Image via Complex Original
From the era of a less racially inclusive Hollywood to the present day, there have been many instances of one race filling in a role that is meant to represent another. Sometimes the result is flawless, like Sir Ben Kingsley's Oscar-winning portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, but most times the performance is a squirm-inducing, head-scratcher.
The Wachowski siblings' epic Cloud Atlasis currently impacting theaters, and the film features regular Wachowski player Hugo Weaving doing his best Asian portrayal for a portion. It's the perfect reflect on some performances that were less successful in bridging the racial divide. Read on for The 10 Most Uncomfortable Performances by Actors Playing a Different Race.
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Written by Frazier Tharpe (@The_SummerMan)
10. Katharine Hepburn as Jade in Dragon Seed (1944)
Dragon Seed, and Hepburn's performance in it, aren't intentionally or even inadvertently racist, but purely a sign of the times. There's just no way the role would've been cast to form in 1944, of all years. Hepburn is just fine as Chinese heroine Jade, but we couldn't help but be distracted by the visual tricks used to make her look more Asian, particularly the faux slanted eyes.
9. Godfrey Cambridge as Jeff Gerber in The Watermelon Man (1970)
We're equal opportunity critics, so far be it from us to let Melvin Van Peebles' The Watermelon Man slide just because it flips the script and features whiteface instead of black. Cambridge plays Jeff Gerber, a plucky suburban husband who's white as can be, until one day he inexplicably wakes up black.
Apparently studio heads flirted with having a white actor execute the bizarre premise in blackface for the majority of the film, but it was Van Peebles' idea to do the inverse. Either way, it's still jarring and weird, especially when Cambridge essentially continues playing the Caucasian Gerber in essence even after he loses the make-up.
8. Sir Ben Kingsley as Guru Tugginmypudha in The Love Guru (2008)
In 1982, Sir Ben Kingsley won an Academy Award and a heap of others for his portrayal as Mahatma Gandhi, despite the obvious differences in appearance (although he is of Indian descent on his father's side). Curiously, the acclaim was nowhere to be found when he dipped into his heritage again, playing the cross-eyed, heavily-accented, masturbation joke of a character Guru Tugginmypudha in Mike Myers' colossal misfire The Love Guru. If he hasn't been banned from India, he should be.
7. Justin Chatwin as Goku in Dragonball Evolution (2009)
This isn't a completely different franchise that shares the same name as the immensely popular Japanese anime series. Nope, Dragonball Evolution is intended to be a straight up live-action adaptation. Ponder then, why the superbly Caucasian Justin Chatwin landed the lead role as Japanese Dragonball hero Goku? Did studio execs think his Asian-style gelled hair would be sufficient?
The lazy casting doesn't stop there either—Chatwin's future Shameless co-star Emmy Rossum fills in as Bulma Briefs, along with James Marsters as Piccolo (he's green, so we guess that was up for grabs). Karmic justice was doled out for white-washed casting thirst, as the bid to make the leads more relatable failed and the film tanked.
6. Richard Dreyfuss as James Krippendorf, Natasha Lyonne as Shelly Krippendorf, Gregory Smith as Michael "Mickey" Krippendorf, and Carl Michael Lindner as Edmund Krippendorf in Krippendorf's Tribe (1998)
In Krippendorf's Tribe, Richard Dreyfuss plays the titular anthropologist and single parent who uses his grant money to support his family. To skate on charges of grant misuse, the father of the year cooks up a fake tribe, and then dresses his sons up in blackface-esque makeup and other types of stereotypical tribal garb to back up his story.
His daughter Shelly (Natasha Lyonne) has the common sense and decency to steer clear of this offensive scheme, but her brothers Edmund (Carl Michael Lindner) and Mickey (Gregory Smith) fully commit, with Krip and love interest Jenna Elfman join in for some of the "fun" as well. The result is embarrassingly goofy chants, shrieks, and movements that would make an actual tribe scratch their heads. (With their fingers, not spears, you damn racists.)
5. Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello (1965)
Olivier is one of the best Shakespearean performers, and one of the greatest actors, period, to ever do it. With that said, we completely understand why the major movie studios largely backed away from this project, because he lost his mind on this one.
To portray Othello, Olivier completely covered himself in blackface makeup, and if the fact that he doesn't remotely resemble any actual dark-skinned person we know isn't enough, he also created his own special accent that catapulted the performance into comical waters. Should've settled for Iago, bro.
4. Rob Schneider as Salim in You Don't Mess With The Zohan (2008)
Rob Schneider has fashioned his career with the single-minded mission to offend every race and culture with one cartoonish, caricatured performance after the next. He's taken his one-fourth Filipino heritage and run with that to play everything under the sun, so the hardest part was deciding just which role we had the biggest issue with.
Ultimately we settled on Salim, the Middle Eastern cab driver and would-be terrorist from the annual Adam Sandler turd of '08 You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Around the time that Salim dialed "1-800-Hezbollah" it became clear that Sandler and Schneider's co-enabler act needed to be stopped once and for all. Four years later and we're still waiting.
3. Peter Sellers as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968)
Peter Sellers was a comedy king, and part of his appeal was admittedly parodying anybody and everything. We also suppose that if an actual Indian actor was cast in The Party, which finds Sellers as a bumbling Indian actor experiencing a classic case of fish-out-of-water during a Hollywood dinner party, the film might have come across as more derivative and racist than it does now.
Most importantly still, The Party is indeed damn funny. But a solid argument can be made that Sir Sellers took his performance a tad too far, crossing the thin line between parody and caricature.
2. Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Breakfast at Tiffany's was made at a time when Hollywood wasn't all that pressed to cast roles according to the race of the characters. Many films from the era still featured all-white casts even if the script dictated that they're not actually playing a Caucasian.
Which brings us to Tiffany's Mr. Yunioshi. Is his yellowface makeup and transcendent stereotypical performance off-putting? Well, yes, but Yunioshi's contribution to this classic film is indisputable so...wait, what's that? This entire movie could play out with the exact same beats without Mr. Yunioshi the eccentric Asian neighbor? Oh.
1. C. Thomas Howell as Mark Watson in Soul Man (1986)
Forget performance, this whole premise makes us uncomfortable. C. Thomas Howell plays Mark, an atypical spoiled rich kid who suddenly finds himself faced with the prospect of paying for Harvard law school on his own. What's a yuppie to do when the best scholarships are only being offered to African-Americans? Get a job? Fuck that, instead chug some tanning pills to subvert that blasted Affirmative Action and beat em at their own game!
Even more reprehensible, we're supposed to believe that the likes of James Earl Jones and Rae Dawn Chong actually buy his shitty blackface and Jheri curls as the real deal. There's also inevitably cringe-worthy dialog like "So, do you hate The Beach Boys now?"
After the film's release, C. Thomas and Rae Dawn were briefly married, so does that give him a pass? We say, hell no. You fucked up with this one, Ponyboy.