It's certainly something I continue to think deeply and carefully about - but this kind of pushback can't really come in good faith until the inverse problem she's complaining about - has been even remotely fixed.
We can't stop making movies look like the real world simply because Black Panther came out, or because there's one lesbian superhero.
Obviously Miller is speaking from a ridiculous perch - but as oblivious as she is (she's probably not oblivious this morning, I'd guess) , she's also a perfect example of "plank in her own eye" AND legitimately of wage disparity and other issues that effect her directly (which she's not talking about here).
We're going through some of this with casting now for a project, where we took the approach that race should be irrelevant - especially in a sci fi future - when it comes to casting, but the industry has loads of externalities that make finding the perfect actor challenging - and make hiring diverse casts extremely difficult depending on where you're hiring. For example if you're filming in Eastern (or some parts of Western) Europe, then hiring leads - and extras - of color simply to make your world look adequate, becomes tough - especially when you're competing for limited actors with other projects and deadlines.
I do agree with ONE note she touches on - that stunt casting for some sort of diversity olympics should be considered carefully - on the one hand the "best actor for the role regardless of race or background or personal life" is absolutely true and essential for quality - but we should also as an industry be pushing to make it easier for people of color, or nonbinary gender, or religious background etc etc to get into the industry to fix it - and one way to do that is to make a heavy lifting effort on your project. "Stunt" casting is an extremely blinkered term with baggage - like "affirmative action" - which should really be called, "how about we stop fucking people over all the time and adjust our society for equity and opportunity?"
But then you bump up against, "Well what if I want to hire an actor for a gay part, but the actor is straight?" There's a great argument for hiring a straight actor (let's use Tom Uncanceled Hanks in Philadelphia) but that means a gay actor is being ignored or passed over. Hanks brought eyeballs and attention to important issues with his star power and ironically his heterosexuality - and arguably did more good than harm for other gay actors and issues. That's been true for a few movies, sometimes well executed and well liked, sometimes poorly done with good intentions, sometimes a mess from top to bottom (Aloha).
But then you run up against more logistics: You have an important gay role. You want to hire a gay Middle Eastern actor out of simple principle (he's not a flamer or a terrorist or a nerd, in case you're wondering about this imaginary role). But there are necessarily fewer available actors that meet that definition just statistically. So you're competing for that actor in ever decreasing venn circles. I think there's also an extreme that nobody is really suggesting is going to happen - casting a woman to play a man, without any aspect of the plot (we do this with gay/straight people all the time, but they tend to act that part inn the performance) might break immersion for audiences in a mainstream film. Or even having a single biological family played by people of obviously different ethnicity. Nobody is complaining about that - because it's not happening outside of non-literal productions like Hamilton - where that kind of (arbitrary) mixed casting is actually making a specific effort that's part of the production's intent. But it might backfire in something played more naturally - like Downton Abbey.
Point is you can't solve it all at the casting call - you have to solve it institutionally, and I mean literally starting in kindergarten and making kids understand that it doesn't matter what they look like, or who they love or what they wear on their head, that they can be artists and performers. And then we have to make sure that the promise is kept at every stage - elementary school drama school, script, audience, movie, TV show, whatever. When that effort has succeeded, we can start fretting about "forced diversity casting" because until that's true, it's like complaining about a missing sorbet course in a twenty course meal. It's not a real problem and the opposite - that casting is monolithically heteronormative, white, etc is still very much the status quo.
Sienna is complaining about something that's barely happening as if it's an all-out assault on entertainment. She's still vastly more likely to get hired for roles than her non-white coutnerpart - but she's going to run into real issues like sexist ageism and so on.
We can't stop making movies look like the real world simply because Black Panther came out, or because there's one lesbian superhero.
Obviously Miller is speaking from a ridiculous perch - but as oblivious as she is (she's probably not oblivious this morning, I'd guess) , she's also a perfect example of "plank in her own eye" AND legitimately of wage disparity and other issues that effect her directly (which she's not talking about here).
We're going through some of this with casting now for a project, where we took the approach that race should be irrelevant - especially in a sci fi future - when it comes to casting, but the industry has loads of externalities that make finding the perfect actor challenging - and make hiring diverse casts extremely difficult depending on where you're hiring. For example if you're filming in Eastern (or some parts of Western) Europe, then hiring leads - and extras - of color simply to make your world look adequate, becomes tough - especially when you're competing for limited actors with other projects and deadlines.
I do agree with ONE note she touches on - that stunt casting for some sort of diversity olympics should be considered carefully - on the one hand the "best actor for the role regardless of race or background or personal life" is absolutely true and essential for quality - but we should also as an industry be pushing to make it easier for people of color, or nonbinary gender, or religious background etc etc to get into the industry to fix it - and one way to do that is to make a heavy lifting effort on your project. "Stunt" casting is an extremely blinkered term with baggage - like "affirmative action" - which should really be called, "how about we stop fucking people over all the time and adjust our society for equity and opportunity?"
But then you bump up against, "Well what if I want to hire an actor for a gay part, but the actor is straight?" There's a great argument for hiring a straight actor (let's use Tom Uncanceled Hanks in Philadelphia) but that means a gay actor is being ignored or passed over. Hanks brought eyeballs and attention to important issues with his star power and ironically his heterosexuality - and arguably did more good than harm for other gay actors and issues. That's been true for a few movies, sometimes well executed and well liked, sometimes poorly done with good intentions, sometimes a mess from top to bottom (Aloha).
But then you run up against more logistics: You have an important gay role. You want to hire a gay Middle Eastern actor out of simple principle (he's not a flamer or a terrorist or a nerd, in case you're wondering about this imaginary role). But there are necessarily fewer available actors that meet that definition just statistically. So you're competing for that actor in ever decreasing venn circles. I think there's also an extreme that nobody is really suggesting is going to happen - casting a woman to play a man, without any aspect of the plot (we do this with gay/straight people all the time, but they tend to act that part inn the performance) might break immersion for audiences in a mainstream film. Or even having a single biological family played by people of obviously different ethnicity. Nobody is complaining about that - because it's not happening outside of non-literal productions like Hamilton - where that kind of (arbitrary) mixed casting is actually making a specific effort that's part of the production's intent. But it might backfire in something played more naturally - like Downton Abbey.
Point is you can't solve it all at the casting call - you have to solve it institutionally, and I mean literally starting in kindergarten and making kids understand that it doesn't matter what they look like, or who they love or what they wear on their head, that they can be artists and performers. And then we have to make sure that the promise is kept at every stage - elementary school drama school, script, audience, movie, TV show, whatever. When that effort has succeeded, we can start fretting about "forced diversity casting" because until that's true, it's like complaining about a missing sorbet course in a twenty course meal. It's not a real problem and the opposite - that casting is monolithically heteronormative, white, etc is still very much the status quo.
Sienna is complaining about something that's barely happening as if it's an all-out assault on entertainment. She's still vastly more likely to get hired for roles than her non-white coutnerpart - but she's going to run into real issues like sexist ageism and so on.
