Ben Kingsley in the Iron Man 3 trailer

[fiddlingfrog]

The official trailer for Iron Man 3 was released on YouTube earlier today.

Comments

[katieupsidedown]

Yeah, when I initially heard about Kingsley's casting I was like "Wait, did they just cast a white guy in an Asian role?"

Then I took two goddamn seconds to actually Google it and discovered that he is not, in fact, white, and kept my mouth shut.

Seriously, YouTubers. You are already on the internet. Right click + search Google.

[aaron_bourque]

Ben Kingsley played Ghandi.

[ice_hesitant]

The Mandarin is a specifically Chinese rather than a generically Asian role, so casting an Indian actor is also weird.

I also find casting Danny Pudi, who's Indian, as an explicitly Arabic character on Community to be weird.

[akbar56]

They did play off of that by getting Danny to work in his own dual heritage by making Abed be half Palestinian and half Polish (Danny is himself half Indian/Polish)

[crabby_lioness]

Yay, it's Sir Ben!

I'm amazed at how many people haven't seen his astonishing body of work. The man is one of the greatest actors alive. It's serious overkill to cast him as the Mandarin, unless they intend to make the Mandarin 100,000 times less silly than he is in the comics.

[ice_hesitant]

Ben Kingsley played the villain in Uwe Boll's BloodRayne. He may be an amazing actor, but he's also capable of phoning it in for a paycheque.

[icon_uk]

And follows in a long tradition of high quality actors doing this. When asked why he was taking a rather cheesy role in Inchon, Sir Laurence Olivier replied "For the money, dear boy". See also Dame Judi Dench in "Riddick" and Sir Michael Caine in Jaws 4 (To which he has noted ""I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house it built, and it is terrific!")

There seems to even be an entire page of TVtropes devoted to the concept.

[empty_tea]

Sir Alec Guinness, Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen...the list goes on.

[aaron_bourque]

Enh, he's a knight. In my book, he can play any role, any nationality. Is it fair? Nope. But he's still one of the best actors alive.

[aaron_bourque]

Hey, you wanna get mad about dumb Hollywood casting in re: Asians, get mad about The Last Airbender or the upcoming Assassin's Creed movie. Michael Fassbender's a good actor, too, but as Altair? AND Desmond? That's not right.

[dejadrew]

Eh, it doesn't exactly blunt the argument from ALL sides. Casting someone of a different race, in this case, even though the actor is not white, is kind of acting like all flavours of not-white are interchangeable, isn't it

[espanolbot]

The film makers got money from a lot of Chinese film companies, and they felt that having the Bad Big be a Fu Manchu-ish supervillain might offend people in one of their bigger potential markets.

They also said that Mandarin has over definitions beyond being an ethnic group in China, but make of that what you will.

[akbar56]

It works for me in the case that they are changing up The Mandarin to be tied to the Ten Rings terrorist cell we first met in the first film.