Skarjo wrote:Yea, I've got no problem with there being a certain race heavily implied by circumstance (it would be difficult to argue for a white Black Panther, just as it would be difficult to have a black guy play Henry VIII), but even then, so long as there's some kind of justification for it then a different ethnicity is fine.
For instance, a lot of Shakespeare's plays have been updated and then had the ethnicities flipped from what would have been implied by the original text, but I don't think anyone had a problem with that.
On that note however, the current run of Amadeus has Lucian Msamati playing Salieri (I had tickets to see it in February but unfortunately could not make it, but reviews have praised him highly) so I would argue that it's not out of the question to have roles traditionally thought of as white going to non-white actors. The cursory google search also brought up a few portrayals in comic book adaptations where race roles were played with that I had completely forgotten about (Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin, Michael B Jordan as Johnny Storm, Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent). Didn't even realise that in the original works both Agent J and Jackie Goddamn Brown were whities, so in those instances reframing the race portrayal was absolutely for the better.
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