Yo JJ, cast Angela Bassett as an older Ahsoka Tano in IX! She should bearound 60, and both Togrutas and Angela Bassett age slower than most humans anyway.
(also Indonesia is far from the only place with Naga snake myths, the word naga itself is Sanskrit which is from India/South Asia….. JKR keeps digging herself a deeper and deeper grave)
they literally had a bollywood movie called nagin a couple decades ago about a snake who could transform into a woman like gtfo jkr
Did someone ask her why Nagini is played by a Korean actress?
This bitch would probably go “Indonesia? India? Korea? Pfffffft. Same difference.” Also she’s not the casting director, so the fuckup goes way beyond her. It’s societal and systematic.
That’s true indeed. However if she did care, which she doesn’t, she could’ve most likely casted another actress bc at least during the Harry Potter days she did have influence on the casting, so I assume she does now too. Not that this would’ve helped with the initial awful concept…
I fucking hate it. There are so many layers of fuckery here it’s hard to unpack, but just confining myself to the casting:
Nagini is a Sanskrit name and yet she is played by a Korean woman. Not that casting an Indian woman would have made this shitshow any more palatable, but the idea that Asian identities are largely interchangeable? The levels of racist ignorance wow.
Yet again, the face of “Asia” is the palest East Asians. We already have a problem with Asia, the largest continent in the world and a hugely diverse one, being thought of as mostly Northeast Asia, with other groups regularly erased. Nice way to make this explicit. Again, not that casting a Desi woman would have made it better because this whole idea is so fucked from the start, but it is an extra shit cherry on top.
The exotic Asian slave woman who in this case is literally dehumanized, just gahhhhh no.
I don’t blame Claudia Kim for taking the role, actors of color often have to make the choice between shitty jobs and no jobs at all. This may well have been one of her better offers for all we know. I do blame Rowling for masterminding this total shitshow.
I’d like to correct myself on one point: At the VERY LEAST, if this massive fuckup of an idea was going to go through they should have cast an Indian/Desi actress. This whole character concept is a shitty ripoff of South/Southeast Asian culture and an actor from that culture should have benefited from it career-wise. Kim might not have been responsible for the final decision but she did benefit from her privilege as a lighter-skinned woman who keeps being seen as more “Asian” and more acceptably exotic than Desi women and many many other groups of Asian women.
Welcome, Naomi Ackie! A woman with British accent and dark hair–must be another of KK’s picks. 😂 Given her age I’m guessing she is the mysterious Caro?
I can’t find a birth date for Ackie. Wikipedia guesses 1992, so she might be 26? That would put her in the same age range as Boyega and Ridley (although the character of Rey is younger than Finn in the movie franchise). From her list of roles it looks like she’s fairly new to acting.
Now that i think about it. In a universe so full of aliens, there isn’t really a prominent alien character introduced in sequel trilogy? Like, there’s barely any aliens in the rebellion? Y’all why is it so human and white in our galaxy far far away all of a sudden. I mean, it’s always been very white, but at least we saw more aliens. Hell, they exist. They rebel. Show us aliens, lucasfilm you cowards! Stop giving us every white brunette you can scramble up!
What’s more, there’s a long history of casting POC as aliens in heavy makeup/CGI. I would dearly love it if we had a prominent alien AND she were played by a white brunette.
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