8 White People Who Were Cast in Roles Intended for Ethnic Actors

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Following comments from a Noah co-screenwriter explaining why only white people were specifically cast in the biblical epic—his words: “…The race of the individuals don’t matter. They’re supposed to be stand-ins for all people…we’re trying to deal with [the] everyman”—it had us thinking about other instances where Hollywood usurped race when the original source material called for a minority actor.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia

Regarding a story where the lead is a Persian prince, the studio decided to go with Jake Gyllenhaal instead of an Iranian actor.

Ben Affleck in Argo

The CIA agent that Argo is based on is Tony Mendez, and Ben Affleck clearly isn’t Hispanic.

Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger

Any time a non-Native American person dresses up as a Native American, it’s bound to create controversy. As was the case with this Disney production which apparently felt Johnny was more suitable to realistically play an indigenous person than an actor who’s actually indigenous.

Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily

It’s still in pre-production, but the casting of Rooney in the next Peter Pan film is likely to cause a similar backlash.

Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind

Jennifer Connelly’s character Alicia wasn’t white in the true story A Beautiful Mind is based on. John Nash’s wife was a woman from El Salvador, but apparently that wasn’t all that important when the story was adapted. Jennifer won an Oscar for this role, by the way.

Jim Sturgess in 21

Also based on a true story, 21 tells the story of a group of predominately Asian American MIT and Harvard students who bested the casino gambling system. Except in the movie version, none of the developed characters were Asian. Producers even commented on the noticeable absence of minority actors by saying they didn’t have “access to any bankable Asian American actors.”

Justin Chatwin in Dragonball: Evolution

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

The Japanese manga was adapted for a film in 2009, but the only thing they modeled after the original character was his hair.

Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz in The Last Airbender

Set in an Asian-influenced world with Chinese martial arts, the main characters of this ensemble cast included zero Asian actors.

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The Apollo 1 Launchpad fire: Recalling to Grissom, white and Chaffee

Men and women have been shot into space from the surface of the earth over the past fifty years - enough that now much of the public in general considers space missions as relatively safe, memorization efforts. Projects that, inconceivably complex and technically nuanced as establishing an SUV of State size of the itinerant art laboratory on the surface of Mars - without breaking it, can still attract the attention of the world. For many people, however, when it comes to missions manned as the discontinued program of space shuttle flights to and from the international space station, the thrill is far away.

But the business of space exploration is not and has never been, surely. Explosions, fires, parachute failure and other disasters have left dozens of astronauts, cosmonauts, pilots and crew worker dead and wounded over the years. Some (Challenger and Columbia, for example) are spectacular, terrifying disasters. Others are smaller, quieter, calamities, but for any involved person who survives, wounded or not, experiences life-changing.

Here, on the anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the history of NASA and its first public tragedy - LIFE.com remembers astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who died in a fire inside your module's command on a platform from Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967. As Jeffrey Kluger time (the author of Apollo 13) wrote once, when three astronauts are commemorated:

Test pilots can feel immediately if they are working with a good vehicle or a bad one, and the crew of the Apollo 1... I knew almost immediately that they had been assigned to a scoundrel. By late 1966, the last ship robust Gemini, two men had flown, and NASA was the deployment of the ships Apollo three men who, finally, men to the moon. The spaceship was sweet machines, but in test - runs on the platform, which were a disaster. Fried electrical, communications died, repairs and improvements were late to arrive... More worrying, however, was the insistence of NASA in continue using pure oxygen to 100% in their atmospheric systems - a flammable explosive gas that had worked very well so far in the Mercury and Gemini ships, but that could ignite like gasoline in the presence of both an errant spark... Early one Friday night, when the Apollo 1 astronauts locked up in the spaceship for a session of practice outside of the pad, just a spark escaped a wire frayed along the seat of Grissom. In less than a minute, the three men were dead. For a time, it seemed, the Apollo program would also perish.

The program, of course, survived and less three years after the 1967 fire launchpad, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the Moon and back - leaving human footprints on the lunar surface, in what some consider the triumph firm 20th century.

Ralph Morse - time & life Pictures/Getty Images

Workers in the North American aviation installation CSM-012 "Block I" command module, the type in which Grissom, white and Chaffee died.

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