Vulture's Kyle Buchanan discusses the trend of casting actors like Idris Elba and Lupita Nyong'o in roles where you don't see their faces; Musician Kevin Morby finds inspiration in his L.A. neighborhood; Actor Raymond Lee channels the mindset of a school shooter, and the legacy of Korean rage, in the new play "Office Hour."
Why are Lupita Nyong'o and Idris Elba being cast in non-human roles?
Why Won’t Hollywood Let Us See Our Best Black Actors?
That's the question Kyle Buchanan, senior editor at Vulture.com, asks in an essay published on New York Magazine's culture website.
Buchanan joins John Horn to discuss the trend of Hollywood studios casting black actors such as Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Zoe Saldana and Paula Patton in roles for which their actual faces are not seen. Instead they're playing animated animals, motion-capture characters or painted aliens.
"It seems to me that our black actors just aren't being allowed to be black on screen," Buchanan says. Since winning the Oscar for "12 Years a Slave," Nyong'o's face has only been seen in one live action movie — "Non-Stop." But she was the voice of the orange alien Maz Kanata in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and a wolf in "The Jungle Book." Notably, she's currently performing in the play "Eclipsed" on Broadway. (Later this year, she'll be seen in Mira Nair's "Queen of Katwe.")
Meanwhile, already this year Elba has been a water buffalo in "Zootopia" and a tiger in "The Jungle Book." This summer he'll be the voice of a sea lion in "Finding Dory" and an alien in "Star Trek" who's "slathered in white prosthetics," Buchanan says.
And Elba and Nyong’o aren't alone. In his Vulture story, Buchanan writes: "In this summer’s video-game adaptation 'Warcraft,' Paula Patton is slathered in green paint as the half-human, half-orc Garona, which makes me wonder if she consulted Zoe Saldana for advice before taking the role: After all, Saldana has already played green in 'Guardians of the Galaxy' and blue in 'Avatar.'"
Buchanan said on The Frame: "There's this fear that black actors in particular won't travel well overseas. That's been disproven, I feel, again and again. 'Furious 7' is only the most recent example."
Buchanan and Horn also discussed the other side of what they call a fear-based mentality on the part of Hollywood — the casting of white actors to play Asian parts. This was a phenomenon recently noted in The New York Times.
Horn cited three incidents in upcoming movies in which Asian characters are being played by white actresses: Tilda Swinton will play a Tibetan mystic named The Ancient One in "Dr. Strange"; Scarlett Johansson will play the Japanese cyborg "The Ghost in the Shell"; and Elizabeth Banks will play the Asian character Rita Repulsa in the "Power Rangers" movie.
Buchanan and Horn talked about how this is another aspect to what's afoot in Hollywood studio thinking.
Buchanan: I think it's part of the fear impulse that's restricting black actors. Scarlett Johansson is one of the most bankable stars, but when I hear a counter-argument that there's just not enough Asian movie stars to cast in these films, I think, Well, was Chris Hemsworth a star before "Thor"? Was Daisy Ridley a star before she was cast in "Star Wars"? You can make these people into stars.
Horn: It is a self-perpetuating myth. If you say there are no black stars or Asian-American stars and then you don't cast black actors in leading roles or Asians or Hispanics in any of the leading roles, it is going to be the same story over and over again, right?
Buchanan: So what we have here is the case of Hollywood doing the easiest and, therefore, the most pernicious thing ... just casting white actors whenever they've got a live action role to fill. And they can pat themselves on the back for casting black actors in these voice or motion-capture roles or in these alien roles where you're painting them blue or green. But there's something really weird about that fact that it's almost like erasure, you know? If we see black actors so rarely in dramatic films and big budget studio films, then it's almost as though they're treated as exotic, and so it's not that far of a leap to then brand them as aliens with just a little bit of a skin paint job.
'Office Hour' explores the mindset of a school shooter
In Julia Cho's new play, "Office Hour," three English teachers at an unidentified college share a cup of coffee to discuss a problem student.
Dennis comes to their classes wearing a hoodie, a baseball hat and dark sunglasses. He is sullen and largely non-verbal. But it’s his writing that alarms the faculty. Dennis’ stories are filled with violent sexual imagery, and the teachers fear he's poised to commit a campus shooting.
One teacher, named Gina and played by Sandra Oh, invites Dennis, played by Raymond Lee, to her office to see if she can get through to the young man. Both Dennis and Gina are Asian-Americans, but that’s not the only bond they share.
Before the play's world premiere at South Coast Repertory, The Frame's John Horn met with Lee to discuss the issues that "Office Hour" addresses, how he prepared for the role and how Asian-Americans are represented in film, television, and theater.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
I was walking out of the play and I was behind a couple talking about the play. The woman said, "I think we all knew somebody like Dennis. I wonder if I was kind to him." Which I guess is really what the play is all about.
That is fantastic. This play leaves me emotionally thin, so that really affects me to the bone. After opening night, a kid who works at the theater came up to me. He goes, "You know, that play is about me."
I didn't know how to deal with that except to say, "I love you." We're given this responsibility, once we embody these characters, to be aware of these things. Now I feel like I'm hyper-aware of that.
The play, written by Julia Cho, was inspired by two campus shootings, one at UC Santa Barbara and one at Virginia Tech. Both perpetrators were Asian-American young men. Did you have conversations with Julia about what ethnicity meant in those situations, and what it meant to her as a playwright?
She said when [the Virginia Tech shooter] Seung-Hui Cho happened, she had a very deep connection to it immediately. She said she wasn't surprised that he was Korean, mainly because I feel like a lot of us Koreans possess a rage that comes from I don't know what, several generations of oppression or I don't know what it is, but we have it.
I see it in my mom, I see it in my family. It taps into something that has to be from a cultural place. In addition, [with] a lot of Asian-Americans, silence is a virtue. If you don't have anything good to say, especially to elders, you kind of just keep your mouth shut.
In that way, [when] you add on bullying or something where you're not able to express yourself in a certain way, it exacerbates the whole situation. There are a lot of angry Korean- and Asian-Americans out there as a result, and maybe therapy is not a thing that is widely discussed.
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(Left to right: Raymond Lee, Sandra Oh, and Corey Brill in the new play, "Office Hour")
Does that mean that the shootings at Virginia Tech and UC Santa Barbara were not a foreseeable consequence of that, but somehow linked to that?
I would say so. Seung-Hui Cho in particular, he was dealing with a form of selective mutism. Apparently he was diagnosed with that early on but it wasn't really dealt with. In addition to that, he spoke funny according to other people because he was from Korea. Not being able to communicate affected his particular situation.
I want to ask about acne. Your character, Dennis, has very bad skin, and it's part of the story. What is that about?
I do the makeup myself. With each blemish, I see Dennis start to develop more and more. Acne is kind of crazy, right? Everybody has their own understanding of how bad they actually look, and sometimes it can not even be that bad, but it can look really bad to themselves. So anyway, you take medication like Accutane that's supposed to help the situation, but it only makes it worse.
It causes depression, suicidal thoughts, and all these crazy things. You just need to have acne to understand the torment that you put yourself through, where you don't want to deal with people or anything. I had experienced that as some point in my life, and I get to exorcise those feelings through this role, so it's pretty fantastic.
Dennis is more than withdrawn. He calls himself dead, that he was largely bullied when he was growing up, or girls found him revolting. It's a really sad person we see on stage. How do you get there as an actor?
It starts with the nugget of being mistreated. Any time we've been rejected by a person, or rejected in general, we remember those moments really well. ... Doing research on all these shooters really helped to get into the minds of these people. And then to blow that up to a place where you might even think about killing yourself — and then to be able to deliver that to the audience.
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(Left to right: Sola Bamis, Corey Brill, and Sandra Oh portray three teachers in "Office Hour")
There's a point in the play where Dennis talks about how civilization needs people to bully. It's very emotional. The thrust is that civilization would break down if people like Dennis weren't around because they are "born to be hated."
In the beginning scene of "Office Hour," you see three teachers talking about a particular, troubled student. I feel like at the end of that, they might feel accomplished in just talking about the student, instead of doing something about it. I think there's a desire in people to address these things that concern us, but don't really have to deal with.
You had a role in the movie "A Leading Man," which was about some very serious issues like bigotry in the entertainment world. It's about an Asian-American actor trying to make it in Hollywood. How much of that story feels a bit too close to home?
A lot of it. [The writer/director] Steven [J. Kung] was very brave in wanting to attack this issue head-on. It didn't really hit me that I was feeling this way until the film presented itself to me.
Feeling which way?
A feeling that there's misrepresentation happening. A cultural misunderstanding. I've had to avoid accents and stereotypical roles actively, which takes me out of the running of a lot of things. It's this whole idea of fairness. We just want to be treated as equals.
You're talking about not wanting to play a role as a caricature. The other issue is that parts are not written blindly in terms of ethnicity. Is that a problem too, that you or other Asian-American actors are not considered for roles that don't have a reason for an ethnic identity?
Yeah. Here's how I'll choose to answer that because I think there are much more well-informed people who can speak on this better than I can. I will say that in big budget films, I feel we have very little control or power. In television, I feel like it's getting better. And I feel like in theater it's very "there."
What I love about doing theater is, these are high-quality people that have their hand on the pulse of American culture and the world. They're continuing to tell stories about the world and people are watching it and loving it and enjoying it. That's where I feel like it can be, in a macro scale, but I don't think it's being allowed to happen.
So the part of Dennis that exists in this play doesn't exist in film and television.
I don't think so. And even if it does, it'll exist on a small, independent scale.
What happens to the play after it closes? Will it be revived?
Oh, I hope so. I think it's a really meaningful play and I think it connects with a lot of people. Everybody is walking out of it feeling really great.
"Office Hour" runs at the South Coast Repertory through April 30th.
For one musician, Mt. Washington is the poor man's Laurel Canyon
Just a few miles north of downtown Los Angeles in a quiet neighborhood surrounded by trees and hills, musician Kevin Morby was inspired to write his new album, "Singing Saw."
Morby lived in New York performing with the folk band Woods until 2014, when he decided to relocate to Los Angeles, specifically to the Mount Washington neighborhood.
"All around the mountain, there's York Boulevard and Figueroa Street and downtown is super close," says Morby. "My friend Kyle and I, he's my neighbor and has his own band called King Tuff, he's become a close friend and we call it the poor man's Laurel Canyon."
The Frame's James Kim went on a walk around the hills of Mount Washington with Morby to talk about how that environment sparked his creativity.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
When did you find out that hiking around Mount Washington was conducive to your creative process?
When I was writing this record, my days were all spent inside. My girlfriend would go to work and I would just write all day long. As soon as I noticed the sun starting to set, I would force myself to go on a walk and get out of the house.
There's a willow tree that makes its way into several of your songs on "Singing Saw." Why was that such a focal point lyrically?
It's just one of those things where not seeing anybody all day long and then going on these walks, this sort of became a character, almost as if I was seeing another person that I got used to seeing everyday. I think it feels like it's watching you, it feels like it sees you coming, and once you pass it, it's still looking at you.
When you work on anything all day, you don't leave the house and you don't see anybody else, you start to feel sort of crazy. I think that why that when I would go on these walks, I feel everything is watching me or reaching out at me or something. I think that L.A. has this — especially somewhere like here where it's seemingly rural but you can always see the skyline of downtown — it's very cinematic. I don't know, it's almost like I wanted to score my walks, and not just my walks but my life here. I wanted to soundtrack them in a way.
Where were you in your life when you moved in Los Angeles?
When I moved to Los Angeles, I was 25 and I'm about to turn 28. I was touring a lot while also living in New York. It's kind of like you could do one or the other, but doing both is sort of its own suicide, because neither place offers time or space to oneself. I was going to quit playing music so I had to sort of quit New York.
I feel like I turned the corner around my twenties in the past couple of years and just becoming more comfortable in my own skin, and also very reflective. I've had a good chance to breathe and look at myself and the things that I do, the things that I've done, and that I'm trying to do.
What is it about the environment you're in that inspires you to write?
I'm just sort of susceptible to my environment. It's not something that I really noticed about myself until I suddenly had two albums that were very much influenced by New York or travel. I guess it's just you sort of write what you know, and when your day-to-day life is spent in a place, it could make its way into your songs.
Kevin Morby's new album “Singing Saw" is out now. He kicks off his worldwide tour May.