Image Credit: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth/LandovIs it Jake Gyllenhaal, Jerry Bruckheimer, Gemma Arterton, or the fairy princess dress? This sure is a tough one. Vote after the jump.
The world premiere of ‘Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’ at London’s Vue Westfield, May 9, 2010.
Annie on Twitter: @EWAnnieBarrett
Bruckheimer’s hair looks like an aging leprechaun
How is it that I can think you’re mean, yet be in total agreement?
Yeah, I was going to say his hair as well. He’s got a sad Donald Trump thing going on. What is it with millionaires not owning combs?
Real Persians are often considered caucasian, due to the large percentage of their genetics coming from Indo-European traits. So it’s common to see them fair skinned with dark hair and eyes.
Yes, and all the evil Persians are dark skinned and scary looking.
Just like there are no Chinese / Tibetan Boys between the age of 10 and 14 who can speak English and do martial arts. This tragic dearth of Oriental and Asian children has forced the makers of The Last Airbender to cast white people in the main heroic roles.
Never fair though they have also removed the Inuit and Japanese (themed) character from the show and replaced them with white or light skinned heroes and darker skinned bad guys.
Personally I’m glad that The Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender have removed the need for us to build a time machine to go back to the 60s.
I’m waiting for the remake of Boyz in the Hood with Matt Damon, Freddie Highmore, Dakota Fanning and Robert Pattinson in Tropic Thunder style blacked up make up.
Yay Hollywood…………..
*APPLAUSE*
*clap clap clap*
Yawn, ok whatever PC king. They are staying loyal to the look of the game (in which the characters didn’t appear very “persian” anyway). In Far and Away you had Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman playing Irish people, an Australian and an American. It’s a movie dude get over it. In Iron Man II, Samuel Jackson plays Nick Fury (a white character) and in Rising Sun they changed Wesley Snipes character from a white man (in the book) to a black man in the movie, totally changing character dynamics so it happens both ways buddy.
FYI, Marvel turned Nick Fury into a Black character before the movies did. In their Ultimate universe, he’s specifically modeled after Samuel L Jackson.
Getting soooo tired of this lame racialized hate feat against TLA. What makes anyone thing there are actual Inuits (for example) among the characters of that fantasy cartoon by those two (very) white boyz.
Inuits of the pre industrial age, and even as recently as 100 years ago were quite a bunch. The woman were treated like property and shared among the tribe. They didn’t wear their hair in “loopies,” so much as wash it in urine that their families saved for that purpose. Oh, and they left their old folks to die on ice drifts and such when they became too much trouble.
Avatar was a cartoon aimed at adolescents, and hardly a anthropological tract… but it’s heady stuff compared to the lameness of a movie made from a violent and repetitive video game that could have as easily been “Prince of Smurfia.” Maybe they should have skipped the semitic Gyllenhaal (yea, he’s half Jewish and therefore at least a cousin to the rest of the ME) and cast Ahmadinejad.
The racebender haters just can’t get enough of this inane race game of theirs.
here here!!!
what a racist comment. Persians are white. sounds like your source is just the movie 300 which is full of lies.
I have yet to meet a light skinned Persian person (even though I know perhaps a few of them exist). I’m just saying, if you are going to make a movie that deals with people from Persia, why not have the lead actors look more like the majority of Persians in the country?
LMAO @ the title of this post!
Is it wrong that I find Jake more believable as Persian in this picture than I do in any of the trailers I’ve seen?
Oh, and the dress wins overall.
This is quite the racist poll
JJ, you’re missing the point entirely. Get a clue.
Annie we should revive “Heathers” for another massive run among today’s teens.
How is this racist. How about we change the question to who looks the least caucasion or intelligent or caring and compassionate or likely to make a movie without special effects and with a good story. What difference would any of those questions make. The movie is called “Prince of Persia…” so what is more racist this poll or casting no Persian actors in the leads?
Did you or anyone else complain when a bleached out Brad Pitt played a Troyan? How about all the movies about Greeks that are made with Northern European looking actors? I bet you did not complain at all. So, shall we find a ethnically correct person for every movie to cast or shall we make all the movies geographically generic?
What does this poll mean? What pray tell, does Persian look like? Really stupid idea Annie. Did you want Gemma in Hajib?
captain canuck, to see what a Persian looks like:
1. Go to Iran.
2. Look around.
Hijjab is Islamic/Arabic, not Persian which is imposed to them now by a hardliner government. Plaeducate yourself about Persian culture. Christians also have hijjab!
Maybe it’s a tounge in cheek poke at the way Hollywood has short changed the Asian etc actors in 2 of the years biggest releases. The Last Airbender is much worse in this, even though the dark skinned baddies seem to abound in Prince of Persia. I accept that haven’t seen either film but I have seen the main characters in both and the last Airbender iseem far worse in this respect.
Actually, when the movie project first began, they were tentatively in talks with an ACTUAL Persian actress…(I forget her name, but she was in Crash…) Not sure why they didn’t go with her.
how about…”who looks the most bored to be at this premiere?”…Jake…hands down.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
Don’t know about the poll… I’m too distracted by the picture. Jake’s head looks really large with respect to his body for some reason…
How about, who fits our target demographics to best broaden our movie’s appeal to the lowest common denominator? Sure, they could cast an ethnically accurate unknown, or even some marginally successful actors of color (Lost’s Naveen Andrews could fit in here even though he is British-Indian). Truth of the matter though is that the only color that matters in movies is green.
It is, the trouble is that producers can be so blinded by the dollar signs they don’t realise that they could make as much, if not more money without demonising the darkies and whitening the goodies.
Massive in built audience for The Last Airbender and a fair chunk of them already have a bad taste in their mouth about the movie, when they should be counting the days untill its release. (Stop if I’m wrong but haven’t they made the incredibly risky choice to open TLA just after Twilight? With the negativity, that bad buzz on “converted” 3D movies and the enormous popularity of Twilight that seems a big risk to me.
How does Naveen Andrews look Persian??? Oh, he does NOT. People in Iran have many ‘looks’. Though majority of people have olive complexion, dark hair and dark eyes, there are good number of people who have light skin, light hair and eyes. I am one such person. =) I am so sick and tired of the stereo types Hollywood portrays so that the people watching movies think everyone in Iran looks like characters from the movie 300 (that movie was racist). The purpose of this polling is to merely point out that the actors in this picture do not look like what normally is portrayed as ‘Persians’ and demand a revision? Should all ‘Persians’ look like the 300 characters? Would that make everyone happy?
LOL, I was laughing SO hard last year reading forums that were discussing Prince of Persia. People all over were like “Sayid from “Lost” should play the role, not Jake, Jake is white!”. Idiots, Naveen Andrews is Indian, a race distinctly different from Persians, therefore making him no more ideal for the role than Jake, if we’re gonna cast actors in roles solely on the basis of race.
I should also add that the title character in the Prince of Persia games looks a hell of a lot more like Jake than it does Naveen, I’m not even kidding. Go look up “Prince of Persia game” on Google images, and you’ll see the video game character doesn’t look ethnic at all.
Here’s a very long reply….
@BlackIrish4094 Mon 05/10/10 2:32 PM
By using the term PC you’re demonstrating a complete and utter misunderstanding or ignorance of what I was actually talking about.
You’ve also shown ignorance over the Colour of Nick Fury, who was not only made a black man in Ultimate Marvel but they asked, and received, Samuel L Jackson’s permission to both make the character look like him but use his famous mannerisms and speech type.
You don’t bother to try and address the point I actually made about The Prince of Persia at all, instead trying to be all Aint-it-cool-news (minus the profanity) and score points against me as a person over the movies and / or a genuine social problem. It’s laughable that you try to take the fact that 2 white actors from countries other than Ireland were chosen to play… 2 WHITE characters, appallingly done with some of the funniest accents in movie history. By your logic I’m better placed to play James Bond than Hugh Jackman, because he’s Australian and I’m British. Even though it’s established that Bond is White and I’m Black. The fact that I can’t act for …. doesn’t help either! I reckon I could write a decent Bond movie though if you’re reading Eon?
To say it happens both ways is an insult, as well as stunningly misinformed. How many mega budget Hollywood films are there a year where the bulk of the cast, if not the cast entire are all Asian? Film, American film in particular has historically had very few major roles for non white characters, especially non side kick, comic relief or just plain bad guy. There’s a massive amount of unbalance and we’re not talking about taking a film like The Godfather and remaking it with one of the major crime families being black or Asian to redress the balance we are talking about taking a film, based on a top quality television show, an extremely good and very popular one, where the clothes, music writing names, traditions etc are ALL based very clearly on Asian culture: Where the fans, young and old have very, very clearly identified the characters based on the visual and audio clues the show gives us.
Gil Nueman Mon 05/10/10 3:06 PM.
This dismissal of the worth of the material simply because it was a cartoon is bad enough and clearly signposts your disdain for the reality of people’s feelings here. My girls are both mixed race and with no prompting from me, or their mother, were mortified when they saw the actors portraying their beloved heroes and anti-heroes. The eldest, 10 was the one to notice that the Fire Nation were one, not Japanese and two somewhat darker than all of the good guys. If not for a brief glimpse of Appa I think they would have hated all that they saw. But that’s ok it’s just a show.
It doesn’t work both ways, it cannot, any more than you could take a blind character or a set of characters with disabilities and replace them all with fully able bodied characters and say it’s ok because this one character in some other film was changed to being deaf or mute. There are untold roles and films about fully able bodied characters so it is not balanced. Shall we take Tomb Raider and change the character, one of a tiny amount of action roles for women and make the titular heroine a man? But that’s OK because we changed Starbuck to a woman in Battlestar.
It just isn’t the same and what’s worse is it isn’t even necessary. Avatar: The Last Airbender is already wildly popular; what’s more is the fact that it is an extremely well crafted and deep covering a range of issues from parental abuse, totalitarianism, politics, the individual VS The state, honour, duty pacifism, and the usual adolescent coming of age issues. If directed properly,( and it should really take 6 films, 2 per book, not the one book a film approach hinted at here)then you have a series that could outshine Lord of The Rings in quality and make Harry Potter look like superficial Saturday morning fluff.
PC? Everyone is sick of change for changes sake, or to look good in the media. Marvel comics have always been the market leader in comic books, (Since their golden Marvel age in the 60s). One of the reasons was their effort to make the comic book world look as much like the real world (super powers aside) as possible. That’s why their comics are set in real cities, like New York or London etc; whilst you could have read countless DC comics without either seeing a non white hero or even a non white, non criminal, even in the background. Marvel always pushed the envelope and had characters and stories that could have led to them losing money (advertising and so on). They had plenty of characters, good AND bad, Hero AND sidekick, Cleaner and billionaire that were women, girls, black, Native American and so on. Sorry if that bores you, but as a black kid that kind of thing appealed to me. Despite this history, this reputation, Marvel still feels that had there been a level playing field had they been able to do whatever they wanted throughout their history they would have had even more female (and active no “Invisible Girlie girls”) and non white characters. Why is that a problem? Nick Fury as a black guy works, it’s cool and he’s a great character, I’m looking forward to seeing him pop in and out of Marvel’s movieverse and a large role in The Avengers and the S.H.I.E.L.D or Nick Fury movie(S).
I’m just having a lot of trouble understanding how anyone can think taking, say Blade, Storm and War Machine and making them white is exactly the same as taking, Nick Fury, Spider-Man and Iceman and making them black, Korean or whatever. Why? Because the majority of the remaining heroes will still be white; and it wasn’t risky to make strong, non white and non male heroes in anything from literature to film and TV. Anyone who knows the smallest amount about just Star Trek and the struggles they had, many lost, to have strong women and important non white characters on the show. They aren’t being Pc when they make some of those changes, (Making Colossus the main Gay character in X-Men for example) they are simply making creative decisions based on what they’d like to read and write and potential readers may want to see.
It aint about PC it’s about doing the right thing. Writing a list of “flaws” in Inuit lifestyle as some bizarre excuse to not have them in the movies, especially when you’re spouting a bunch of mostly disproved and antiquated assumptions and half truths, is genuinely insulting. Even if they weren’t how many cultures do not have a tradition of extreme violence and what we think of sick practice? If you drown you’ll be off to heaven if not we’ll burn you because you’re a witch?
I made, what I thought was a tongue- in-cheek, witty post to illustrate what I thought the thread may have been referencing. I’m willing, as always to have a genuine debate with you guys, now that all the points scoring is over with but don’t put a spin on something that isn’t even there. I made some points which have a deep basis in fact and which about 2 minutes of watching the show will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. There isn’t such a big backlash against the casting from people of many colours and races because we all get together and think, Hmmm, what shall be complain about this year? We were all looking forward to a live action version of one of the best shows I’ve seen, and one of the best stories I’ve encountered. My wife is white, I’m black and our 2 girls are obviously mixed race. Now if anything we should all be looking forward to this new mix of cultures that we’re apparently going to have. We’re all eager to see which race / culture from the original story is going to be played by black actors in the film. As yet I haven’t noticed any. Maybe we’ll be the swamp benders? Hmm well as they’re related to the water benders maybe not? I wonder if the Fire Nation has slavery.
Seriously though you really do need to look at these issues with more respect and understanding. Listen to why people are upset and if you think they’re wrong explain with something more substantial than, out of the thousands of main character roles that were originally white males a dozen or so were changed to non whites so that’s ok? Next you’ll be telling me you don’t think Dragonball was based on journey to the West!