10 Worst Examples Of Hollywood Whitewashing
4. Joseph Wiseman As Dr. No (Doctor No, 1962)
The James Bond series may not be renowned for being the best when it comes to racial politics (remember that time Sean Connery’s Bond disguised himself as a Japanese man by using a fake tan and squinting?), but it started out with one of its more regrettable offences.
Doctor Julius No, the eponymous villain of the first Bond film, is meant to be a half-Chinese half-German mad scientist. Now, that’s drawing on a lot of stereotypes already before we’ve even started to think about casting, so they must have had to be careful.
Of course not – they cast Joseph Wiseman, a Canadian Jew, and applied a bit of yellow make-up to make him look the part. All the racial politics going on here are a lot to think about, and we haven’t even mentioned that he was meant to have no hands.
It was the biggest job of Wiseman’s career, but he later admitted that he looked back on the role with great disdain – and who can really blame him?