The actress to play Nora in the movie adaptation of the book Warm Bodies.
I don’t take issue to this actress, she’s quite pretty, and according to the article I found out about this from(found here) quite talented. The only issue is…
“Nora is sitting in the sand in front of the log, playing with some pebelles and pinching a smouldering joint between her middle finger and the stub of her ring finger, missing past the first knuckle. Her eyes are earth brown; her skin is creamy coffee.”
“At least you have some cultural heritage you can hold on to. Your dad was Ethiopian, right?”
Nora is half Ethiopian, with brown skin. The author of the book said: “Personality is what matters in a character, not superficial indicators like height or hairstyle or even skin color, and the personalities of the cast all fit beautifully.”
Please don’t try to tell me that there was/is not a single female actress that fits all of this criteria a little better. The author must have taken the step to write a character of partially Ethiopian descent for some reason. And why not cast a person of color to play her, then? If the skin tone truly doesn’t matter, then I think it might actually be more out of their way to find and try to justify a white actress playing her than to just find an actress with brown skin and everyone’s happy.
This might be different if skin color truly was a superficial thing, but it’s not. While I don’t judge who a person is based on their skin color, it still has something to say about their heritage and, in some cases, the things they’ve gone through. One of these days I’ll make a post about what my skin color means to me, what it means to those who see me, and what it says about how I’ve been and will likely be viewed for all of my life.
But we’ll do that some other time. As far as this goes, the worst part is that it feels like this author took the positive step to make a main character of color(especially in a genre where you don’t really get a lot of that), then kicked it right in the face. *sigh*
I hope this movie flops more than a limp noodle in a hurricane.
