I know the history, I know Shakespeare's target audience. But that's not actually the question I was asking: why do some people, even some in this very thread, consider it OK for actors to play charaters for whom they are laking some aspects (e.g. class), but not others (e.g. race, gender)? What makes the latter aspects different from the former?
Would it help you to know that Prince Charles and Prince Edward were amateur actors in their younger years, and before her marriage to Charles, Lady Diana had a room at Kensington refloored so she could practice tap-dancing?
How much do you think I'd actually pay to see any of that?
Not so much as a counterfeit, now-nonexistent Canadian penny.
People in the US primarily hung up on "race" - as in "skin colour" - probably has to do with their particular history,
I hope this is a general comment and not one in reference to the context of PhroX's question to me. I'm Canadian, not American.
What in-universe rules are there on the genetics of Hobbits? For all we know, dark skin color could be a recessive trait for Hobbits.
I have no idea. All I'm saying is that genetics matters in terms of offspring.
I get what you are saying and of course you are correct. I will also note that in a typical, Murican made film set in ancient Rome, a substantial percentage of the white actors are not going to be Italian, in a film set in France, there are going to be a bunch of actors, even featured ones, playing roles as French people who are not going to be French at all... and so on. Hell, even white Muricans get played by Aussies or Brits some of the time... and audiences just accept and enjoy it. Chadwick Boseman is from South Carolina, rather than any nation on the African subcontinent, where the fictional nation of Wakanda is supposed to be. His accent in the film is just acting.
Is his accent adequate, though? (I have no idea; I don't watch superhero movies).
There's an author of a very,
very long Harry Potter fanfic I've been reading (350 chapters+) who always praises her beta reader as "the best" but proceeds to mangle about 99% of the French dialogue exchanged between Fleur Delacour and Bill Weasley. I've written to her to let her know that "n'est pas" does not mean the same thing as "n'est-ce pas?" and people in intimate situations don't call each other "vous" (unless you're in a group, addressing more than one person at the same time, but that's not how Fleur and Bill's situation was). There are other examples of mangled French grammar, as well.
She responds to dozens of other reviews, but ignores this and continues to use her mangled, broken grammar. She has included other non-English conversations in Croatian and Russian... I am not even slightly fluent in those languages, so I don't know how badly they've been mangled. But if she can't get simple conversational French right - the sort that kids learn in elementary school, I shudder to think how badly those other languages are represented.
Google Translate is NOT your friend if you don't double-check with a reverse translation to make sure you got it right.
Cloud Atlas was just one example that immediately sprung to mind, where the ensemble cast were playing all sorts of different races, genders and classes throughout the film. Similar is done in stage acting all the time as the numbers of cast members are sometimes much more limited than in a feature film.
Yup. Sometimes it's planned, if the play is a comedy or farce, and sometimes it's because RL kicks the production in the <anatomy>. The first production of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat I ever saw was the year before I started working for that theatre company. The same actor played Jacob and Potiphar, because the actor who was supposed to play one of them died during the months when they were rehearsing. So they made a quick decision that the other actor would perform both roles - doable since those characters' major scenes were far apart and the characters never appear onstage at the same time until the very end. It made the curtain call a bit iffy since that was done in groups of characters, but the audience understood that the same person couldn't stand in two places at the same time (with both the brothers and the Egyptians).
There were male characters playing females or vice versa? Or blacks playing whites or vice versa? I'd have no issue with that as a viewer, provided it is convincingly pulled off - would be an amazing feat actually. Just seems as an extra challenge that could be avoided in the first place by casting an actor who matches the role...
Here's a question: Given that Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night has a set of fraternal twins as the lead characters - a man named Sebastian and a woman named Viola - and women weren't allowed to perform on stage during Tudor times, any performances of this play would have had a man playing the role of Viola. This was considered the right thing to do in Tudor times, but is it the right thing to do now, if you want a 100% authentic Shakespearian production?
And since Viola has to pretend to be a man for much of the play, you have a man pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a man while secretly in love with the lord she's taken service with. Both she and her brother think the other is dead in the shipwreck that had them end up in Illyria.
Modern productions skip one level of complication and simply cast a woman as Viola and try to make sure that the actors cast as the twins bear some physical resemblance to each other. Casting actual twins could be done, but how many sets of twin Shakespearean actors are there? It actually does matter that the actors resemble each other, since the other characters are supposed to think that both Sebastian and Viola (dressed as a man) are the same person.
, so there you kind of have to use movie magic.
