New Pittsburgh Courier: Put “ancient Egyptian people” into a Google image search, and none of the resulting photos resemble Christian Bale or Joel Edgerton, stars of Ridley Scott’s biblical epic “Exodus: Gods and Kings.”
The director inflamed calls for a boycott of the film with his comments last week that he couldn’t have made such a big-budget movie if “my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such.”
“I’m just not going to get it financed,” he told the trade paper Variety. “So the question doesn’t even come up.”
2 comments:
Movies like these lead me to agree with the consensus of disgust in casting and equality for actors. Financial or what ever political reason they may have. Casting almost exclusively white actors for such a film is ridiculous. Joel Edgerton is a great example to handling white actors playing such roles. I think the hair, makeup and costume design are perfect at making him look the part but the same can not be said for the rest of the cast like Christian Bale and Sigourney weaver who flat out look out of place. Now i have not seen too much else of the film besides the trailors but I am curious to see if there is a distinct skin tone difference between the royals and the slaves to show a royal distinction between the slaves that are out in the sun all day and the royals whom don't leave without being covered by shade.
I think though the director's excuse of financial influence because people don't go see movies with "mohamad so and so..." proves that there is a stereotyping occurring in the casting of this film. I would be ok with the director choosing to using an all white cast for artistic reasons or actual acting capabilities but admitting to such financial and business influences reveals the bigotry.
I really love Ridley Scott, but he can be an ass too sometimes I guess. "Mohammed so-and-so" is not the kind of language the leaders of our entertainment industry should be using when talking about the complicated issues involved in racial casting. Since the rise of the Catholic Church, there has always been this psychotic insistence to portray the major biblical characters as white. Well, at least the "good guys." Is it any surprise the one major New Testament character the Catholic Church consistently maintains as black is Judas Iscariot? Anyway, it shouldn't be a stretch to hold leaders in the arts industries to higher standards than the pope when it comes to equality and sanity in portrayals of race. Mr. Scott has truly missed an opportunity here to do something wildly different with his epic: to tell the story as it was supposed to have happened, and by the people who have been telling it for 2000 years. The story of Moses is not a white American story. If you want that story, you should stick to Joseph Smith.
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