In a week when Disney was slammed for casting a straight man, Jack Whitehall, as its first openly gay character, the question of authenticity in casting is once again a hot topic. And it’s one that American actor and writer Alia Shawkat has strong views on.
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“I’m working on pulling away masks and trying to reveal my personal, authentic self,” the 29-year-old, best know for her roles in Arrested Development, Broad City and Transparent, says. “That’s how I want to work.”
Shawkat, who identifies as queer and whose father is Iraqi, stars in and co-wrote, with director Miguel Arteta, the Netflix film Duck Butter, about two women who meet in a nightclub and agree to have sex every hour for 24 hours as an antidote to what they see as inauthenticity in relationships.
Alia Shawkat, co-writer and star of the movie Duck Butter.
The bulk of it was shot during a 24-hour period in which Shawkat and her co-star Laia Costa slept for all of 20 minutes. The location was Shawkat’s house. Authentic indeed.
You might expect, then, that Shawkat would take a firm line against Disney’s casting choice, which follows the recent backlash against Scarlett Johansson’s casting as a transgender woman in Rub & Tug (a project from which she subsequently withdrew). That she doesn’t reflects the complex (dare we say non-binary) nature of the factors at play.
“There are people in the film playing gay who are not gay [such as Costa], and there are people who are gay playing gay,” she says. “Is it bad that we didn’t hire all lesbians for this? There was a part of us that was disappointed that we didn’t. But we were also really big fans of these actors.”
But while the Whitehall backlash was understandable (and foreseeable), gay actors are hardly at the coalface of diminished opportunity these days. The same, however, can't be said for some other minorities.
Jack Whitehall with Eva Longoria in Decline and Fall.
“I think people get frustrated because there are so few opportunities for people who are disabled or transgender – and if there is an opportunity, why wouldn’t you give it to an actor from that background,” says Lena Nahlous, executive director of Diversity Arts Australia.
While Nahlous doesn’t believe there should be a blanket ban on casting an actor who does not share the identity of the character, she does suggest that in a realm of limited opportunity for minority performers, “You have to have a good reason not to.
“[Family Law creator] Benjamin Law said you need to call bullshit on the claim you just can’t find people – it might take more time, you might have to look a bit wider, but if there are opportunities to employ diverse people, why wouldn’t you?”
Musician and academic Peter Tregear, who recently wrote in defence of Opera Australia’s decision to cast a Caucasian performer as the Puerto Rican Maria in West Side Story, acknowledges discrimination has been, and perhaps in some cases continues to be, an issue. But he argues that insisting only a person of appropriate background can play a particular character risks “running from one set of prejudices to another”.
Scarlett Johanssonplayed an alien in Under the Skin, but she will not be playing a transgender woman in Rub & Tug.
“There’s a fundamental contradiction here if you say the only person who can play a character of type X is a performer of type X. That works against the audience being able to identify with the experience of part X unless they are that themselves,” he says.
The key issue, though, is surely opportunity. “If all things were equal then everyone should be able to play every character. But all things are not equal,” US transgender star Laverne Cox noted in a recent roundtable discussion for Variety. “The suggestion that acting is acting and we’re on a level playing field is ahistorical and apolitical.”
Laverne Cox at the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2016. She was the first transgender woman to be nominated for an acting Emmy.
That view was borne out by Screen Australia’s 2016 report into screen diversity, Seeing Ourselves, which noted the problem begins at the scripting stage and then flows through to casting.
“In my experience, we naturally assume all characters are straight and white unless otherwise stated in the script,” one producer/director commented. “It's important that we change this initial assumption about characters and provide greater diversity for the audiences that we purport to represent.”
That’s a view Shawkat shares. There are, she notes, more performers from more diverse backgrounds than ever before. But most of the people who are deciding what gets made, and who gets cast, are “still straight white men”.
“So it’s going to take time. I think it’s more important to get those different types of people in the power seats,” she says.
In the end, the biggest driver of diversity on screen will probably be the fact it makes good business sense.
“Eventually,” says Shawkat, “the people who are watching movies, we’re going to have make stories about them.”
Alia Shawkat is in conversation for the Melbourne International Film Festival at the Comedy Theatre, Saturday at 1.30pm. She appears at MIFF in Duck Butter and Ethan Hawke's Blaze. Details: miff.com.au
You can hear Karl Quinn on the weekly pop culture podcast The Clappers and follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
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