10 Aug Hollywood Has a White Dude Problem

BY JORDAN KAUWLING

The other night I was watching the 2006 Darren Aronofsky film The Fountain. It’s about a guy who travels across time and space to reunite with his great love. Or maybe it’s more a travel of the mind. I’m not sure. It’s an Aronofsky film so it’s beautiful and grand and also a little bit up its own ass. 

In certain points in the film plot threads brush up against ancient civilizations and peoples. A scene relatively early into the movie sees the protagonist take on an army of Mayan guards in an effort to gain access to the even more ancient Tree of Life—otherwise known as the Fountain of Youth. Our lead, a Conquistador, gains access to the fountain of youth and at a different point in the movie he travels to the Mayan underworld, Xibalba. 

This would all be very intriguing to me if the lead character wasn’t played by the guy who played known-racist P. T. Barnum in that one circus movie. 

The part is played by Hugh Jackman. 

The thing about this role and this movie in general is that Hugh Jackman is a white guy. A perfectly lovely white guy but a Dwight Guy nonetheless. And that’s a problem for the plot of this movie because clearly this movie would have been infinitely better (and probably better received at the box office.) had the role been written for and given to a person of color. More specifically a person of Indigenous American background who could have carried the audience through the cosmogony of ancient pre-spanish Mayan theology. They could have told the same story, albeit a much more contextualized one, and given power to something that should seem so obvious: the support and amplification of diverse voices and backgrounds in storytelling. 

It probably never occurred to Aronofsky to lobby to cast a person of color in this film. That’s not necessarily a direct swipe at the auteur, either. Just that, most directors, if they aren’t people of color, don’t think to cast people of color as their leads. And most directors are white so most leads are…I think you know where this is going. 

Only 2 out of ten lead actors in film are a person of color—even though domestic per capita movie attendance (pre-pandemic) continued to increase in the past five years and the world market paints a very different demographic picture than the lily-white audiences we’ve been socialized to believe movies need to cater to. The scales are still extremely unbalanced. With roles written and cast specifically for people of color few and far in between, movies that cast a white actor in a story that feels better suited told through the eyes of a non-white actor sting especially hard. Think if 2018’s Black Panther had been told entirely through the eyes of Martin Freeman’s character. Or if Hollywood made a movie about Asian warriors but the lead was some white dude. Or another white dude. 

In recent weeks, the 2020 Emmy nominations were announced and while shows like HBO’s Insecure and Pose got some big noms, others felt left out of the narrative. Actor John Lequizamo sent out a tweet that took aim at the lack of representation and accolades found for Latinx actors. The tweet received valid criticism of anti-Blackness—pointing out the Latinx community in Hollywood’s seeming lack of support for Afro-Latinx actor Jharrel Jerome who won an Emmy in 2019 for his role in When They See Us. There’s also the issue surrounding the nomination of Billy Porter from Pose while the other cast members, all Black and Brown Trans women of color, remain overlooked. 

While Issa Rae and Black Lady Sketch Show both being nominated is great the fact remains, white men disproportionately make up the decision makers, the writers rooms, the casting directors, the studio execs and the academy boards and until that changes the stories that are told, who gets to tell them and who gets awarded will continue to reflect that disparity. 

It’s time for Hollywood to change. Beyond reaching across the chasm between the stories they have been telling and the stories they could be telling. It’s time for a reckoning and reallocation of power in the industry. Where actors don’t feel a need to react out of a spirit of scarcity because roles and jobs for people of color will be so commonplace that everyone gets a seat at our newly built table. 

Jordan Kauwling is a writer and podcast producer in Los Angeles. She believes that Black Lives Matter and that nothing changes if nothing changes. Argue with her on Twitter at @cinnamonlafemme