Books to Movies: Acting is a Job

Acting is a job.

I can never forget this fact. It's one reason I often feel bad when an actor is dropped from a series. I can't forget that the actor has just lost income.

 

I can also never forget that actors are always looking for work. 

 

The Bridgerton series on Netflix, based on the same novel series by Julia Quinn, uses the premise that George III, played sweetly by James Fleet, married a woman with possible African ancestry. This possibility is highly unlikely. However, it expands casting to black actors.*

 

I have mixed feelings about these types of changes. They rarely happen in the other direction. And I get irritated when critics accuse anyone who balks as "racist." I thought people who wanted The Little Mermaid producers to cast a Danish girl with red hair as Ariel had every artistic right to want that. I didn't mind the casting (the far-too-long script suffers for reasons that have nothing to do with the casting), but objections to casting aren't automatically about politics. They can, in fact, be about imagination. (See post about Cadfael.)

 

Regarding Bridgertons, I mostly don't mind. I thought that Regé-Jean Page made a great Darcy-type (the Simon Bassett character). I think Adjoa Andoh makes a fantastic Lady Danbury. If the British ARE going to keep producing these Jane Austen-type pieces, might as well expand them so more people can get work.

Of course, another approach would be to develop stories about black members of the middle class at that time period. There were not very many, but there were some. Just as there were Black Boston Brahmin in America by the mid-eighteenth century.

 

Does a made-up history result in people missing THOSE stories?

 

From the point of view of employment, I suppose what matters is that parts are out there.

 

*Murdoch Mysteries and Sister Boniface take an interesting approach here--they increase the percentages. Many Sister Boniface episodes involve celebrities visiting the small village of Great Slaughter. And in truth, in the 1960s, many black actors and actresses and singers were television celebrities (see Sidney Poitier, Nichelle Nichols plus performers, including Nat King Cole, on the Ed Sullivan Show). And, regarding Murdoch Mysteries, there were in truth far more black doctors and dentists and business owners in the early 1900s than current histories of the Western world might suggest. The numbers are greater on Murdoch Mysteries and Sister Boniface but historical reality is not being tampered with.