Colour-blind casting is the new normal. But we should still be alert to less palatable realities

Has colour-blind casting become the norm? The practice has been on the rise for years, gaining widespread attention with the premiere, in 2019, of Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield and the first series, in 2020, of Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton. Both were set in 19th-century England. Both featured black and Asian-descent actors playing members of the British bourgeoisie and aristocracy (including the queen). Neither was particularly bothered about traditional notions of historical fidelity to what such people would have actually looked like. And both brimmed with mischievous energy.

“I hope it encourages [other] casting directors, other producers, other directors, to feel it doesn’t have to be this way,” Ianucci said. It certainly did. It’s remarkable how quickly colour-blind casting went from novelty to ubiquity. Black hobbits in The Rings of Power. Idris Elba as Thor. Actors of colour playing police officers in 1930s England.

There are sound practical and ethical reasons for casting this way. It means actors of colour are not excluded from the entire western literary canon, or from the vast majority of historical dramas. Audiences will see themselves fully represented on screen. And the best person for the role can be chosen regardless of extraneous factors such as racial or ethnic identity. Besides, white people have been playing nonwhite characters since the first flickerings of cinema.

However, some have argued for years that the whole thing is just tokenism. It would be better, they argue, to extend the canon rather than tinker around with history. Others advocate instead for “colour-conscious” casting, à la Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, where the performances of nonwhite actors as white historical figures form a central part of the creative intent. Others again just see the whole idea as crass liberal virtue-signalling.

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Colour-blind casting really began in theatre, where it was often the subject of vigorous debate. (The black playwright August Wilson described it as a “toxic form of assimilationism”.) But it plays quite differently on screen than on stage. Not for the first time, there is an obvious tension here between film’s opposing poles of the fantastical and the hyperrealistic. In fantasy and sci-fi, the old rules about what elves or Valyrians or Vulcans could or couldn’t look like have been largely dispensed with. And the same is increasingly true of historical dramas.

Not everyone is happy. In the New York Times last week, Kabir Chibber complained of the recent Wonka that “the story was set in a fantastical past, but its cast looked like a utopian 21st-century London, with actors of British and Caribbean and Asian backgrounds all stirred together”.

He also pointed to Murder Is Easy, a recent Agatha Christie adaptation from the BBC, in which the detective at the heart of the story (played by David Jonsson) is now a Nigerian immigrant. “An African man solving crimes in a rural English village of the 1950s, as the sun sets on the empire – yet his race is barely mentioned or considered and never makes any material difference in his experience,” writes Chibber, who describes this sort of ahistorical revisionism as the “Magical Multiracial Past”.

From this perspective, colour-blind casting leads to a weird new sort of world-building in which history is purged of all its prejudices and oppressions and people of different races mingle comfortably in a way that, frankly, didn’t happen. There is something bland (and, ironically, homogenised) about the results.

Unashamed historical relativism should cause us to be concerned about where colour blindness might lead

Who benefits? Chibber quotes James Baldwin: “A great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see.”

A recent controversy over Google’s artificial intelligence image generator, Gemini, offers a dystopian scenario of where all this might be heading. Gemini was withdrawn after users started to notice the strange results it was giving to certain requests. Asked to produce a picture of people who looked like the United States’ founding fathers, it generated a group of people of various races in 18th-century costume. Requests for a group of Vikings and, even more startling, of members of the German army in the second World War, produced similar multiracial results, including an Asian woman in Wehrmacht battledress and a black man wearing an Iron Cross.

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The absurdity of Google’s attempts to rewrite history was rightly mocked, and its engineers have gone back to the image-generating drawing board with their tails between their legs. But there was something chilling about the entire episode, including attempts in mainstream publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post to defend the intentions of Gemini’s designers, and even to argue that depictions of multiracial Vikings or German soldiers were not necessarily inaccurate. That sort of unashamed historical relativism should cause us to be concerned about where colour blindness might lead if, as seems possible, it becomes embedded unquestioningly in cultural discourse.