 "Watch: Matt Damon is a Chinese warrior who battles dragons in 'The Great Wall'")
Matt Damon’s forthcoming The Great Wall, which has the star playing a warrior defending the Great Wall of China against ancient monsters 1000 years ago has come under spotlight for an obvious problem: Matt Damon is a white man who plays an Asian warrior hero in the movie. The movie is directed by Zhang Yimou and set for release in February 2017. Many Asian stars spoke against the ‘whitewashed’ casting choice; most prominently Constance Wu, who stars in the comedy Fresh Off The Boat. Wu released a statement on Twitter and was furious about the plot: Why does a well equipped army need a white man to save the world?
“Our heroes don’t look like Matt Damon. They look like Malala. Ghandi. Mandela. Your big sister when she stood up for you to those bullies that one time,” she says. She also commented that the usual reasons given for whitewashing like the lack of competent racially diverse stars and lack of overseas funding don’t hold true anymore. “Can we all at least agree that hero-bias & ‘but it’s really hard to finance’ are no longer excuses for racism?” she wrote in the tweet accompanying the long note. “TRY.” A blog Angry Asian Man called the movie “the latest movie in the grand cinematic tradition of the Special White Person,” adding, “you can set a story anywhere in the world, in any era of history, and Hollywood will still somehow find a way for the movie to star a white guy.” Alot of people took to Twitter to comment on the white washed casting choice.
Constance Wu on Matt Damon being cast as the lead actor in 'The Great Wall'. I couldn't have said it any better👏🏾 pic.twitter.com/kGZlyzeGnX
— the sun’s daughter🌞 (@ephrata) July 30, 2016
Watching the Great Wall trailer all I saw was Matt as Green Arrow @ThatKevinSmith since you guys talked about it :D pic.twitter.com/SMW7e9zE0y
— BossLogic (@Bosslogic) July 29, 2016
this question lol "How much did your own Chinese identity contribute to the development of the film?" https://t.co/t8LCHoaCgZ
— Nicole Chung | @nicolechung on Bluesky (@nicolesjchung) July 28, 2016
Damon is by no means the first white actor to star in a role that might be expected to go to a person of colour, but the release of The Great Wall comes at a time when there’s lot of anger against lack of diversity in Hollywood films. The casting choice comes thirteen years after Tom Cruise was cast as the last samurai of Japan in the film The Last Samurai, and there are still thousands of films that lack casting diversity. Scarlett Johansson is the protagonist of the remake of the Japanese anime classic Ghost in the Shell, Tilda Swinton’s is the Tibetan Ancient One in Doctor Strange, Emma Stone plays the role of role as Allison Ng in Aloha, and more recently a marvel writer criticised Netflix bosses for casting a white protagonist in their upcoming 2017 show Iron Fist. Here’s the trailer of The Great Wall:
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