nothing against Indians or India but why cast an Indian to play the role of an English knight from the middle ages?
what if a white guy was cast to play Martin Luther King or Bruce Lee or Gandhi??
ridiculous.
It's a movie based on a fantasy/legend. There's no historical evidence that Gawain was a real person, or even King Arthur for that matter. The legend and it's characters may have been based on real individuals and certain events, but at the end of the day, this story is a fantasy, and in fantasy worlds, even if they feature real countries of our world, people of any ethnic background can be knights, lords/ladies, Kings/Queens, etc.
No, this is a flawed premise. The King Arthur legends clearly center around the geography of Britain and the French part of Europe, where the majority of characters are descended from Anglo Saxon or Norman heritage. So regardless of whether these events are history or not, and regardless of the presence of fantasy elements such as magic, the tales very much are based on a primarily caucasian part of the world, depicting a society that was also primarily caucasian, with european-centric values. Seeing an Indian person as a Knight in Dark Ages Britain doesnt ring true, magic or no magic, headless knight or no headless knight. Try casting Arjuna with a white actor in the Mahabharata and see how well that would be received in India, and cue the cries of white washing roles.
shareThe flawed premise is that only a white actor can play a fictional character whose skin color is irrelevant to his story. It's called acting for a reason, and the fact that Dev Patel traces his ancestry to India is meaningless. He looks the part, and he plays it superbly.
Moreover, I'd argue that an Indian actor is especially appropriate in the role as the Knights of the Round Tables are legendary, mythic characters who represent and embody the spirit of Great Britain. Indians make up a significant portion of modern-day Great Britain, and India herself was once controlled by Britain. The Knights should look like Britons, and Patel is a London-born citizen of the U.K.
If the movie was set in modern day in a retelling of the King Arthur mythology, I would have no problem with Patel playing a knight of the round table, as this would reflect modern times and the current Indian population of Britain and would be perfectly in context. But as this story is set in Dark Ages Britain, in a white anglo-saxon society that almost certainly didn't have any Indian people living there at the time, much less any of them even a knight, the main character being Indian when everyone else is anglo-saxon breaks the immersion.
So the skin color or ethnicity does matter for the sake of authenticity, fictional or not, magic fantasy elements included or not. And I see you had no rebuttal to my argument that there would be huge issues if a white actor was cast as Arjuna in the Mahabharata, and that this would be a huge issue for Indian people and considered off-putting and just as immersion breaking as it is when Patel plays the role of Gawain. By your logic, there would be no issues with a white actor playing Arjuna if he's as good of an actor as Patel. But I'm very sure that India would have a huge problem with that.
I think the most interesting thing you wrote is that you feel it "breaks the immersion." That's very telling, whether you'll admit it or not, because for nearly anyone else watching it does no such thing. No one even notices, especially an actor like Patel who doesn't have particularly distinctive Indian features. It only "breaks the immersion" for someone who has an issue with his race to begin with.
I didn't address your comment about Arjuna in the Mahabharata because it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. We can have an entirely different discussion about that, but it doesn't interest me as much as your notion that "only whites can play this role."
you're fucking retarded.
shareAgree. It matters.
sharewhy did they even have a tree play a man? shit doesn't even make sense. what if a white guy was cast in the movie "21" based on the real life story of an asian guy? fuck up.
shareIt took me out of it. Nationalities aside, his mother didn’t look like she would be Arthur’s sister, not even a half sister. I much prefer casting directors try to make blood relations plausibly resemble each other.
share