In historical dramas, authenticity has always battled with artistic license, creating a certain tension between truth and art. The age-old question is now receiving a jolt of modern politics as casting fashions of the day present pictures of diversity that are historically misleading and even absurd.
The accuracy question has been fermenting in the uproars over blackface and cultural appropriation and such, and it is not always just political correctness: The TV sitcom Friends is belatedly taking heat for presenting a fake 1990s Manhattan mysteriously free of black people, and that risks being rather true. Certainly, actors of all ethnicities should have a shot at the bigtime.
Now comes the TV adaptation of Amor Towles’ novel A Gentleman in Moscow, which invents a 1920s Russia filled with black characters, whose ethnicity is so nonchalant as to suggest a color-blindness of the sort U.S. liberals once yearned for—which is most definitely not even the case in the Russia of today.
Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of “Hamilton” say goodbye to the audience at the end of the performance during the closing night of “Hamilton” at Centro de Bellas Artes on Jan. 27, 2019, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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The story involves Alexander Rostov, a nobleman who unwisely returns from a Paris exile to his newly communist homeland, whereupon he is arrested to face a Bolshevik trial. Played by Ewan McGregor, Rostov is spared execution thanks to the intervention of a childhood friend who has become a top Communist official. That’s Mishka, played by the Nigerian-British actor Fehindi Balogun.
The unique plot device is that as punishment Rostov is confined to the Metropol Hotel, where he spends decades living in a small attic room, navigating relationships, becoming a waiter, and somehow never running short of funds for brandy at the bar as he occasionally meets Mishka.
Amid the ever-worsening misery of communism, the hotel is maintained in fading splendor to fool tourists and serve the nomenklatura—the shamelessly hypocritical communist elite. It’s something of a golden cage for Rostov, who has a prolonged affair with a famous (white) actress. She is meanwhile pretending to have an affair with the (black, and homosexual) minister of culture.
So, to state, perhaps, the obvious: Moscow back then did not have a significant black minority, and almost certainly no senior officials were black. The series also features black hotel staff like the character Marina—and while this may be less improbable, it too is inaccurate. The Soviet Union was diverse in its Eurasian way, with Chechens and Uzbeks and such, but that’s about as far as it went.
Gentleman might be seen as a flip version of Friends—but it is just as inaccurate.
The choice made by the producers feels different from the decision to cast black and other non-white actors in the recent U.S. musical Hamilton: That was a clear and bold artistic statement in which Lin-Manuel Miranda aimed to reframe America’s history through a contemporary lens by casting non-whites as the Founding Fathers and other historical figures—creating a bridge between the past and the present and openly reinterpreting history.
The off-hand diversity in Gentleman seems of another, well, cast—misrepresenting what was a quite racist country, and essentially nonsensical. So, it has taken heat from scoldy types like one Walter Powell on the discussion site Quora: “Historical accuracy be damned…. It makes most of these woke shows unwatchable because they assume you’re an idiot. I love history and hate the woke nonsense, so I don’t watch them.”
That might sound about right, especially in today’s environment, where wokeness is facing a backlash. But is it, really? Is it fair? Let’s look at the bigger picture.
For starters, clearly, the show is in English, which the real characters would not have been speaking. There’s silliness in that, but it’s also understood, inevitable and basically fair enough. It gets more interesting from there.
Rostov is played by Ewan McGregor, who is neither Russian nor from aristocratic lineage—but he is at least white, supplying a degree of ethnic appropriateness (not that all white people are the same, of course!). The Scottish actor’s accent is Oxbridgean—intended to convey high social status (which indeed had been his “crime”). He also exclaims “Great Scott” when vexed. Few Russians did that.
More lowly characters sport a South London accent. Abraham, the perhaps-Jewish rooftop beekeeper, speaks with an Irish lilt, which (trigger warning for anyone who identifies as Gaelic) seems to signify especially low status (but also folksy wisdom). So insistent is the accent thing that American actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead affects a well-bred British one to play the Russian starlet.
Clearly, the producers felt that various non-American accents in English signaling class distinctions was a more powerful imperative than accuracy as such. It might remind us that artifice in film is not only expected but accepted without question.
Moreover, film and TV have a long tradition of casting actors outside of their ethnicity, nationality, or even gender.
In The Godfather, the Jewish James Caan played Sonny Corleone, an Italian-American mobster, to few objections. More recently, the non-Jewish Brit Helen Mirren portrayed Golda Meir (who spoke with an American accent in real life)—and while there were some grumblings, these were largely dismissed and even mocked. Film has given us Charlton Heston as Moses and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, and many a blond Jesus, all far from ethnically correct choices. In 1982’s The Year of Living Dangerously, Linda Hunt played a Chinese-Australian man named Billy Kwan; it just was so, and the performance won prizes and raves.
Could it be that the only ethnic incorrectness we care about is the one that appears to attach to race and specifically to African-descended actors? If so, perhaps you start to see the problem.
One might argue that the central issue should be the truth of the characters’ essence—via performances that conveyed something deeper that transcended race or national identity. Heston’s Moses was meant to embody a biblical archetype of stolidness, leadership, and faith. Taylor’s Cleopatra signified an alluring power, much like the historical queen. View through this prism, Balogun makes for a fine Mishka.
There is also an exception to be made in the case of satirical alternate history, a genre which thanks to the exploding of streaming content is now enjoying a heyday of a sort. Thus, in The Great, set in Tsarist Russia, we find the nobleman Arkady played by a black actor and Catherine’s co-conspirator Orlo by a Punjabi-descended one (and the American Elle Fanning again faking a British accent in order to play the German-born Empress of Russia). It was aiming to be wacky, nothing more.
Where to draw the line? Anywhere? Could the Jewish-Canadian comedian Seth Rogan play the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (if “appropriation” exists, then surely in both directions)? Could an Asian actress in a wheelchair play him? Could Native Americans in cowboy films be played by blond Scandinavians? If at some point it’s too absurd, well, who decides?
Is casting Mishka as a black Communist official in 1920s-30s Soviet Russia a clumsy attempt to insert diversity where it doesn’t belong, distracting from the narrative rather than enriching it? Is it wokeness—insisting on black identities even where none existed as part of a post-truth relativism? Or, rather, might it be a bold plug for color-blindness—that now-unfashionable liberal dream?
In the end, I suppose, it is the market that decides. If viewers feel that such casting choices are out of touch or pushing an unnecessary agenda of political correctness, they may tune out. Alternatively, the market might embrace them, leaving questions of authenticity to the quibblers alone. If audiences end up thinking Lenin was an African-Russian, perhaps that’s no worse than blond Jesus.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Art is the proper task of life,” suggesting that art’s role is to reveal deeper truths about existence. Pity the grumpy philosopher! He forgot about the commercial side. And his books sold rather poorly.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former Chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
