Actor Growth

Over the past few days I have been hearing so many people talking about this on how so many roles that are meant to have an Asian male playing the lead along with an Asian lady never seems to end up that way. Instead, the Asian male is replaced with a Caucasian actor and so in most films that have a couple’s role you won’t see an Asian male as the lead.

Conceptually I personally don’t see the problem as you see multicultural relationships all the time in this day in age. Of course, the biggest reason I hear all the time why you never see an Asian lead in these types of situations is because North America in general is not ready or able to relate to or sympathize with an Asian male playing something that doesn’t have some kind of crazy action role in it.

In many ways though I would say the Asian film making community is not doing enough to break these stereotypes and in many ways contribute to it. For example, during my participation in that moviemaking marathon one person told me how he was so disappointed that the character I portrayed didn’t start physically fighting back more and that some people criticized how it seems like I had no form of training when it came to say fighting.

I then looked at him and said “When was the last time you saw two business people say whip out crazy weapons and start fighting each other with high flying martial arts?” Similarly I then made him think more by saying how the story was about a guy that wasn’t a fighter but in the end he used his brain more and ended up fighting very well that way. Then it kind of clicked to him where the film was trying to be more realistic and that everything he saw began to make more sense. Sure enough, he was a person of Asian descent as well.

I even mentioned it before too where one of the roles that I have yet to play is something revolving around a dedicated romance/drama genre and sure enough auditions for these types of roles are virtually nil even from an independent circuit. The ironic thing is that there are a ton of aspiring filmmakers who are Asian here as well and usually when the script does revolve around a couple even the Asian filmmakers write the script to have a mixed couple too. So with that, how can there really be complaints from the Asian community?

It’s mostly just a matter of doing more work and getting our faces out there. Even for myself, since I do a lot of drama roles people often are shocked at that as it is not as usual to see that from an Asian in North America. Just a matter of the filmmakers being open minded at this point I’d say.