Why Won’t Hollywood Let Us See Our Best Black Actors?
Vulture Wed, Apr 27 11:07 AM PDT
Idris Elba is in four major studio films this year, but you won’t see his face in any of them. Three of those high-profile jobs are voice roles: In addition to playing Chief Bogo in
Zootopia and Shere Khan in
The Jungle Book, Elba has a supporting part in Pixar’s upcoming
Finding Dory. His only live-action role in the lot is playing the villainous Krall in
Star Trek Beyond, where he’s buried under so many facial prosthetics that he’s more than unrecognizable — he’s a different color entirely.
I can’t fault Disney for wanting to cast Elba in all of those cartoons: The man’s got one of the best voices in cinema, rich and insinuating. And now that Elba has become something of a sci-fi staple in films like
Prometheus and
Pacific Rim, perhaps it was inevitable that he’d don makeup for a franchise like
Star Trek. But as one of the few black leading men in Hollywood, Elba means something. So what does it say when we see so little of him?
I wish I could call all these castings a fluke. I worry they’re not. Look at Lupita Nyong’o, whose most notable roles since winning the Oscar for
12 Years a Slave have been playing the orange alien Maz Kanata in
Star Wars and the white wolf Raksha in
The Jungle Book. 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. (It’s become so common for Saldana to play a different color on film that they even gave her another skin tone for
the controversial clusterf— Nina and thought nothing of it.)
