ONTD original: actors who won awards for yellowface roles

[silverstarry]

I had the idea to do this ONTD original a while ago but I’m a procrastinator so I never got around to actually doing it. On Sunday when Ke Huy Quan became only the second Asian American to win a best supporting actor Oscar, I went to YouTube to find Haing S. Ngor's acceptance speech when he won for 1984's The Killing Fields. Imagine my surprise

Comments

[doriiansz]

Thanks OP for this post. I knew about some of them, but holy shit the list is huge! 🤦

[silverstarry]

If you can believe it, the list of other yellowface roles at the bottom of the post is even longer. I edited it down to actors and movies that most people would recognize.

[just444]

impressive post OP!

[procedurals]

This is an excellent reference post - thank you for putting it together.

As a young adult, I went to Miss Saigon in Seattle with friends from out of town who came specifically to see that & another musical. People were handing out flyers in protest of The Engineer casting. I was more naive back then but I remember thinking the protesters were right; my friends did not 😒

[imnotasquirrel]

so many people (including ontders) tried to defend the yellowface in cloud atlas. pepperidge farm remembers!

[cstoffer]

One of the many many many many reasons why cloud atlas is a terrible movie.

[ty]

That came out in 2012, can you give some background as to what happened a decade ago?

[boomstick]

I never saw Cloud Atlas, but I think it's about people whose souls keep meeting up again over the span of 500 years, and in one of those stories they're all Korean, and all of the white actors are all playing Koreans instead of just getting different actors to play that story.

I do remember hearing that a group of Korean people were laughing their asses off in the theater because they said the Korean characters looked like Vulcans.

[3rdattemptuser]

really informative post, also not surprising that it's this long either.