7 Actors That Hollywood Can't Decide Their Ethnicity

Movies have always been full of smoke and mirrors. It's a fact: all films deceive their audience to some degree, whether it's through filming a scene in Toronto and pretending it's New York City or putting Gillian Anderson on a box so she can stand in the same shots as David Duchovny. But some push that deception further than others, especially when it comes to actors in Hollywood movies. Though it's not practiced much these days, there was a time in Tinseltown's history when white actors would play any race they chose, from Mickey Rooney's infamous Chinese neighbour in Breakfast at Tiffany's to Laurence Olivier's woefully misguided taking of the title role - darkened from head to toe - in his version of Othello. Thankfully that's not really regular practice these days, though there are still a few actors who play characters with nationalities very far from their own on a strikingly regular basis. For non-white actors in Hollywood, there seems to be a lucrative career to be made from playing characters that run the full spectrum of all ethnicities from Argentinian to Iraqi and beyond. That said, there are still a few caucasian actors who seem to enjoy trying their hand at pulling off a decent impersonation of someone significantly darker than themselves, to greater and lesser degrees of success. We'll leave it to you to determine just how dodgy some of these performances are and whether they work for you or not, but in the meantime, here are seven actors who break out of their comfort zone (and occasionally their own skin tone) on a regular basis...