Avatar casting and Charlie Chan--way tl;dr

[sistermagpie]

I have not updated for a while! I think I've been too embroiled in reading and participating in discussions about the Avatar situation. For those who don't know Avatar:The Last Airbender is a fabulous anime-inspired animated show from Nickelodeon set in a world based on various Asian and Inuit cultures. EW just announced tentative casting for four

Comments

[sistermagpie]

Exactly! It's not even a subtle implication--people who say "But it's not Asian, it's American" as if this means they should be white. Sure America doesn't have a single race. But I've read people actually suggesting that there aren't enough Asian actors who *speak English well enough* to do the movie. Ummm...what? Millions of Americans who are also Asian?

[franzeska]

Also, if you're doing a movie then location isn't that important. Most of the actors won't live near your locations anyway. The Stargate: SG1 DVDs are full of episode directors bitching about how hard it was for them to find Asian actors for certain roles because there aren't many Asian actors around Vancouver (at least according to them). This resulted in them paying to fly actors in from LA. Sheesh. Not hard, people! Not complicated! (And, like you say, half of the kids in movies don't have any experience anyway.)

[sistermagpie]

As another post said somewhere--how do they manage to populate whole villages of background people? And always have less of a problem when they decide the character should be non white? In Tropic Thunder there's a kid in it who's Asian that the actors were all praising in the commentary. He plays the pint-sized leader of the drug ring. He learned his non-English dialogue phoenetically and speaks with a fake accent since he's actually American. (I think his name was Brandon Soo Hee.) Based on that performance if this kid was a few years older? I'd definitely encourage him to audition for Zuko.

[anonymous]

I was just talking about this kid with a friend of mine who also mentioned him for Aang.
His name is Brandon Soo Hoo.

ughh

[seven31]

That was me. Again.

Re: ughh

[sistermagpie]

That's it! And look, he does Tae Kwan Do and is trained in things like the bo staff.