![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2014\/04\/n-15149.jpg\" "\\"NOAH\\"")
<\/a>One of the issues that some people have had with Darren Aronofsky\u2019s Noah<\/a><\/i> \u2014 it was never a big-enough deal to become a full-fledged controversy, per se<\/i> \u2014 concerns the ethnicity of the actors.<\/p>\nThe film depicts the annihilation of the entire human race, except for one family that will go on to produce the entire human race as we know it today \u2014 so it seems a little odd<\/a> to some people that pretty much every character we see in this film fits into a single ethnic category, i.e. Caucasian.<\/p>\n It seems even more odd when one considers that the human race was entirely dark-skinned at first, and that lighter skin was a later genetic mutation that emerged as certain population groups moved \u201cinto areas of low UV radiation<\/a>\u201d. The film flips this around by positing that the entire human race was light-skinned at first, or at least right after the Flood, and thus darker skin must have evolved later.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say that this particular issue bothers me too much, for two reasons:<\/p>\n First, the uniformity<\/i> of the casting makes sense in a world that is only ten generations removed from Adam and Eve. There simply hasn\u2019t been enough time for genetic mutations to spread throughout isolated population groups, one way or the other.<\/p>\n Second, the choice<\/i> of ethnicity when casting this film was pretty much inevitable once the filmmakers decided to make a big-budget movie aimed at a global audience. The bigger the budget, the more conservative the filmmaking choices tend to be, and a film of this size was never going to have an all-black cast or an all-Asian cast, etc.<\/p>\n Ari Handel, the film\u2019s co-writer, mentioned a third reason for this casting decision in a recent interview with Christine A. Scheller<\/a> at The High Calling:<\/p>\n In that vein, while there\u2019s a lot of diversity shown in the animal kingdom, there\u2019s no racial diversity in the cast. Can you speak to that?<\/b><\/p>\n From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn\u2019t matter. They\u2019re supposed to be stand-ins for all people. Either you end up with a Bennetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise. You either try to put everything in there, which just calls attention to it, or you just say, \u201cLet\u2019s make that not a factor, because we\u2019re trying to deal with everyman.\u201d Looking at this story through that kind of lens is the same as saying, \u201cWould the ark float and is it big enough to get all the species in there?\u201d That\u2019s irrelevant to the questions because the questions are operating on a different plane than that; they\u2019re operating on the mythical plane.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, in this as in other areas, the filmmakers would argue that it is a category mistake to criticize the film for failing to treat the story as \u201cliterally\u201d as possible.<\/p>\n To be sure, other recent adaptations of the Noah story have allowed for some genetic diversity, by giving Noah\u2019s daughters-in-law (and sometimes even his sons!) different racial characteristics. See, for example, Testament: The Bible in Animation<\/a><\/i> (1996):<\/p>\n The Hallmark TV-movie Noah\u2019s Ark<\/a><\/i> (1999) also cast a biracial actress (Sydney Poitier, daughter of Sidney Poitier) as one of Noah\u2019s daughters-in-law.<\/p>\n But as viewers of Aronofsky\u2019s film will know by now, only one of Noah\u2019s sons has a wife when the Flood begins in this film, and she gives birth to the other two wives later on. So there are only three immediate contributors to this family\u2019s genetic profile \u2014 Noah, his wife, and Ila \u2014 rather than the five that more traditional interpretations of this story have tended to assume. And that reduces the film\u2019s options even more.<\/p>\n As it happens, Noah<\/i> is not the only film that has raised some eyebrows in this regard. BreatheCast<\/a> asked a few weeks ago if the fact that Ridley Scott\u2019s Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/a><\/i> stars Christian Bale and Aaron Paul as Hebrews, and the likes of Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver as kings and queens of Egypt, would \u201cspark tension\u201d.<\/p>\n Certainly the casting on Exodus<\/i> seems to be a little\u2026 eclectic, for lack of a better word. Just within the Egyptian Pharaoh\u2019s own family, John Turturro, an Italian-American, is playing the father of both Edgerton, a white Aussie, and Hiam Abbass, a Palestinian, while a key advisor to the Pharaohs is being played by an actor from Syria<\/a>.<\/p>\n And one could argue that \u201caccurate\u201d casting matters much more in Exodus<\/i> than it does in Noah<\/i> because the story of Moses is much<\/i> more grounded within an historical context \u2014 much less \u201cmythical\u201d, if you will \u2014 than the story of Noah.<\/p>\n So, make of that what you will.<\/p>\n But it does occur to me that I can\u2019t recall ever hearing complaints like these about an earlier ancient epic directed by Ridley Scott, i.e. Gladiator<\/a><\/i> (2000). That\u2019s the one in which the Romans were played by Russell Crowe (a New Zealander of mostly northern European ancestry<\/a>, though one of his great-grandmothers was Maori), Richard Harris (Irish), Joaquin Phoenix (English, German and French on his father\u2019s side, Russian and Hungarian Jewish on his mother\u2019s side) and Connie Nielsen (Danish).<\/p>\n Nor have I heard many complaints about the ethnically-inaccurate casting in the other Greco-Roman movies of the past decade or so. (I definitely heard complaints about the portrayal of the Persians in 300<\/a><\/i>, but that was aimed at the storytelling and its political subtext, not at the casting.) It is only the Bible films \u2014 and, interestingly, other films<\/a> set in ancient Egypt \u2014 that seem to elicit this kind of attention.<\/p>\n Incidentally, I have written about the issue of ethnic diversity and \u201caccuracy\u201d in Bible films on a few occasions before.<\/p>\n Eight years ago, I wrote an article<\/a> looking at how then-recent films like The Passion of the Christ<\/a><\/i> (2004) and The Nativity Story<\/a><\/i> (2006) went out of their way to cast actors who at least looked<\/i> like first-century Palestinian Jews, sometimes with the help of make-up and digital touch-ups (turning Jim Caviezel\u2019s blue eyes brown, for example).<\/p>\n More recently, I wrote a post<\/a> examining the curious decision to cast black actors as Samson and his mother in The Bible<\/a><\/i> (2013), even though virtually every other Israelite character in that mini-series is played by someone with lighter skin.<\/p>\n Wil Gafney<\/a> later observed that that mini-series also plays on certain American racial stereotypes by making Samson \u201cthe big black buck or Mandingo, the brutishly strong, bestial black man [who has a] preferential taste for white women.\u201d<\/p>\n So, as you can see, even attempts to be \u201cdiverse\u201d or \u201cinclusive\u201d can invite criticism \u2014 and sometimes that criticism can be just as pointed as, if not more than, the criticism that the filmmakers would have received if they hadn\u2019t<\/i> made the effort.<\/p>\n April 23 update:<\/b> Handel addressed the \u201cdiversity\u201d question again<\/a> during a panel discussion<\/a> on faith and environmentalism that took place today:<\/p>\n Handel said that he and Aronofsky thought about the issue of diversity in the film before they even started writing it, and \u201cthere were times along the way when we almost abandoned the project because we weren\u2019t sure how to solve the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn this story, God, the highest moral authority of all, says very clearly that one family is good and deserves to be saved, and everybody else on the planet is wicked and deserves to die,\u201d Handel said. \u201cSo those are really high moral stakes. And what was clear to us and essential was that we could not, no matter what, show racial differences between who lived and who died, or we\u2019d be making a terrible, terrible statement.\u201d Handel said that because of this, \u201cwe looked to make a cast, both on the boat and off the boat, who had as little difference as possible. And I want to be clear that there\u2019s no reason that that cast had to be Caucasian. We could have cast any Noah and built the world around him.\u201d After Russell Crowe was chosen for the role of Noah, he said, \u201cthe rest of the casting followed from there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think Ari said it perfectly,\u201d added Aronofsky, who similarly said that \u201cwe nearly abandoned the project several times because we knew it would be an issue.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This point \u2014 that it would have been very dangerous for the film to present members of one race as heroes and members of other races as wicked \u2014 occurred to me as I was writing this post, but I neglected to mention it, except in the comments below.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Should movies like Noah<\/i> and Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/i> aim for greater ethnic “diversity” or “accuracy” when casting their major roles (or even the minor ones)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1321,49,743,536,60,55,63,168,555,2106,696,2105],"class_list":["post-17418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ari-handel","tag-bible-2013","tag-exodus-2015","tag-gladiator-2000","tag-ila","tag-noah","tag-noah-2014","tag-noahs-ark-1999","tag-samson","tag-sydney-poitier","tag-testament-the-bible-in-animation","tag-wil-gafney"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/p>\n