Agreeing with racists
I am all in favour of colour-blind casting--with one important caveat. A director should tread carefully if the casting choices are going to fundamentally change the author's original work.
The default position for me is that age, sex and race are irrelevant, unless the text dictates otherwise. I have performed in The School for Scandal with a female Crabtree. I have directed a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with a female Pseudolus.
Casting a woman as Prospera (as Julie Taymor did in The Tempest) does not significantly change the nature of Shakespeare's original. But casting a man as Juliet would tell a different story than that originally told in Romeo and Juliet. A female Jack Twist would have made a mockery of Annie Proulx's original work.
A black man as Don Pedro? It worked perfectly well in Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. A white man as Othello? It was a lamentable role for Laurence Olivier but Orson Welles got away with it because he changed the focus of the story (though perhaps not very
These things must be evaluated in context. Sometimes it is a viable choice for a director, other times it is not--and directors must bear the blame when their choices fail.
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--James
So, the male Juliet has already been done. Elizabethan England was way ahead of us.
You win the thread.
I actually think that casting in tv and movies should try to be racially sensitive, and yeah, casting a black man as a Norse god was probably a publicity stunt meant to generate controversy. This causes me to think most strongly of Ursula K. LeGuin's response to her work A Wizard of Earthsea being made into a telelvision miniseries cast almost entirely by Caucasian actors, when originally all these characters were people of color:
The makers of the American TV version, while boasting that they were "color blind," reduced the colored population of Earthsea to one and a half. I have blasted them for whitewashing Earthsea, and do not forgive them for it.
Anyone who would like to read some very powerful words on cross-racial casting should read this: A Whitewashed Earthsea. I know a lot of Aspies are fans of fantasy and sci-fi (and comics!), and Ursula K. LeGuin is one of the truly great ones in the genre.
A lot of people have made the same point with the live action The Last Airbender.
I think that characters whose race is specified should be cast as that race in film versions of other works.
I also have to say that racially diverse casting is almost NEVER done when race is not specified. Characters are almost always assumed to be white. And I hate that.
That being said, a black Norse god? Unlikely. I wish they hadn't turned a real and pertinent issue into a publicity stunt.