By Travis Johnson
As you probably know, Netflix is bringing us a live-action, Adam Wingard-directed version of Death Note, the hit Japanese franchise encompassing comics, anime, and live action. And as you also probably know, this version’s setting has been transposed to the US; in tandem with that, formerly Japanese characters are now American – Nat Wolff and Margaret Qualley are the leads, with all the default whiteness that entails. And again, as you probably know, or at least can guess given the temper of the times, a lot of people are unhappy about that.
The term, if you haven’t heard it before, is whitewashing – the practice of recasting non-white or traditionally non-white (broadening the scope to allow for robots and Chinese animal spirits here) with white actors in an attempt to broaden the appeal of a property for the traditional American market. It’s an old, old practice, but in the woke world of today it’s coming under heavy fire. Ghost in the Shell took a drubbing for it, and upcoming children’s series The Legend of Monkey, based on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, has already encountered some criticism for its mostly non-Asian cast.
Now the producers of the new Netflix film have spoken publicly about the controversy. In an EW article about Asian representation, Masi Oka (Hiro in Heroes, remember?) said that the casting came down not to ethnicity, but to voice – they just couldn’t find Asian actors who could speak English well enough.
“Our casting directors did an extensive search to get Asian actors, but we couldn’t find the right person, the actors we did go to didn’t speak the perfect English… and the characters had been rewritten. They could have gone Asian, I can’t deny that. The studios were adamant about trying to cast Asian actors. I mean, this was a difficult one. It was something we were definitely conscious about.”
Interesting.
On the one hand, that sounds like a cop-out – they couldn’t find anyone of Asian extraction who could speak English well enough for the roles? How hard were they looking? On the other, Oka avers that they tried hard to cast Asian – and he is in the film, along with fellow Japanese-American Paul Nakauchi. And on a third, as we just said, Oka is Japanese-American – he’s got skin in this game, and lot more than a hundred well-meaning white hand-wringers (and, in the name of transparency, the author of this article). As an actor of almost 20 years experience, he’s coming from a place of knowledge on the subject.
“I do think it’s case by case,” he added. “It’s not, ‘Oh, we’re definitely not going to hire Asians.’ Sometimes, someone just walks in and it’s like, ‘That’s the guy’ or ‘that’s the girl’ or sometimes it’s a totally different interpretation, and that’s amazing. At the end of the day, you cast what’s best for the role and what makes sense for that adaptation.”
Death Note hits Netflix on August 25, 2017.
