...and what are your feelings on this?

Lupita Nyong'o is reputed to be Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's new version of Homer's The Odyssey. Is this more Netflix-style race-swapping meant to troll rightie audiences? Yet another salvo in the ongoing, tiresome culture war? Before I say anything more, I need to be clear that race-swapping doesn't always hit me the wrong way, and I think a lot of us are still forming opinions about the rightness and wrongness of engaging in the practice. For the most part, my own judgments are more on a case-by-case basis and less rooted in some unchanging, bedrock principle. Sometimes, the race-swapping works; sometimes, it doesn't.

For example, when Dr. Kynes was portrayed as a black woman in Denis Villeneuve's 2021 Dune, Part 1, I didn't see how the doctor's race affected the story being told, so I really couldn't care less. And I had no problem with the decidedly off-white Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho ("Native Hawaiian, German, Irish, and Pawnee"); if anything, I look forward to Momoa's return in the third Dune movie (book review here). 

But when race is swapped for a role in an established "canon," that's a very different matter. Think: black Snape in the upcoming Harry Potter HBO series (Snape is undeniably described as white in the books). Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies (but not his later Hobbit movies if the demographics of Esgaroth/Lake-town are any indication) respected the spirit of Tolkien's canon even if the movies radically changed many of the story details, and part of that spirit involved keeping the fantasy story consistent with the northern European traditions that it is/was tied to. So, yes, that meant there'd have to be a lot of white people. And it meant risking the irrational attacks that predictably arrived: "The darker-skinned orcs represent black people! That's racist!" 

The counterargument against making your cast "look like Los Angeles," as the Critical Drinker sneeringly puts it, is an easy one: just turn the race-swapping around. Should we make a movie about a cherished African myth in which we portray all of the black characters with white and Asian actors? How about a Japanese movie in which all of the main cast is white? (Actually, something like this may have been tried with the "Chinese" movie The Great Wall. I never saw The Great Wall, so I can't say, but many US critics and moviegoers were shouting "Whitewashing!" at the time. Or a more extreme example might be the "white" remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu, which got turned into The Ring with a largely white cast.) What if KPop Demon Hunters had been race-swapped in both its visuals and its voice cast? 

Here's the flip side of the flip side, though: Nolan's The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus instead of a more authentically Greek actor, is already racially compromised, so casting the Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, an Anatolian, may have been a case of In for a penny, in for a pound. And when Zack Snyder's 300 came out years ago, Greek audiences apparently loved the hell out of that movie despite King Leonidas' being played by a toothy Scotsman, and the rest of the Spartans being played by non-Greeks. Race-swapping—a feature of old and modern Hollywood—and people's attitudes toward it, can't be judged by a simple set of principles or properly viewed through a simplistic lens.

It's also fair to say that the issue of race-swapping didn't suddenly appear with the arrival of Netflix and its version of Cleopatra. White Jesus appears in paintings all over the American South, but he was appearing in European images as early as the 6th century. Black Jesus has been a thing in America since the 1800s. Reasons for race-swapping vary with context. When it comes to religious figures, the common refrain is that "we create God in our own image." I can buy that. Modern Hollywood reflexively inserts people of certain demographics because of an unsatisfiable need to cater to "modern audiences" (the Drinker's much-beloved term) and a desire to have an ethnic- and gender-balanced cast, often referred to as "representation." This isn't always evil. And I fully admit that, when watching older films, I do notice the unrealistic whiteness of certain scenarios—something a less racially aware America took for granted long ago. There was definitely a time when minorities of all sorts were underrepresented in movies and on TV. These days, though, overrepresentation may be the problem.

So while I'm not ecstatic about Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen of Troy, I have to be fair and say I'm also not ecstatic about Matt Damon's casting as Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes, at least, came equipped with an aquiline nose for his role as Odysseus). In 2026, we're globally hyperaware of the massive dramatic talent that exists in all countries, so it should have been easy for Nolan to find Greek and Anatolian actors. Instead, he stuck with Damon because, well, Damon is a Christopher Nolan flunky (Interstellar, Oppenheimer). If I have a problem with anything about the upcoming movie, it's less about how it plays fast and loose with history (race-swapped cast, screenplay in modern English) and more about Agamemnon's stupid helmet design which, according to one archery channel that I watch, will simply funnel arrows into one's face. I'm not sure whether I even want to see this movie. I totally missed Tenet, after all, and don't feel an ounce of guilt about that.