10 Worst Examples Of Hollywood Whitewashing

Doctor Strange is a film about a white guy travelling to Nepal to have a go at the ways of the East, and learning them weirdly quickly, so it’s already a bit skirting a fine line regarding its racial politics before we even get into the controversial casting of Tilda Swinton as the character who trains Strange.

Then again, the film’s creators were at least aware of the problem; the awkward situation with the Ancient One’s casting was compared by co-writer C. Robert Cargill to Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru – an unwinnable situation. The character in the comics, which originate in the less PC 1960s, was an old Asian man, and the filmmakers feared that casting as such would be invoking the outdated Fu Manchu stereotype.

They also thought about how casting an Asian woman would be invoking the Dragon Lady stereotype, and a younger Asian woman could be accused of exploiting fanboy fetishes. And so they ended up switching both the character’s gender and race. Try and imagine the charts drawn up by the casting team while working that one out... It doesn't bear thinking about.