Gérard Depardieu playing Alexandre Dumas

[sanguinity]

Yanno, I wasn't ever expecting to be posting film news nor whitewashing news to this comm, but whaddaya know, this time it's an author of color being whitewashed.

Alexandre Dumas is being whitewashed:

The blond, blue-eyed Depardieu sports curly hair and darker skin to play the creator of The Three Musketeers in L’Autre Dumas.

Dumas, the world’s most-read French author and an exuberant, high-living celebrity, was the grandson of a former Haitian slave. His father, although a Napoleonic-era general, was referred to as a Caribbean “negro”.

In his lifetime the novelist was mocked for his African features and he called himself un nègre. [...]

Non-white celebrities, some Dumas experts and black organisations are angry because they say that the producers missed a chance to celebrate ethnic diversity in France and remind the world of the writer’s origins. “There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence,” Jacques Martial, a black actor, said.

There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence.

I find this casting choice especially unfortunate given that most people seem to already assume that Dumas was white. A couple hours of Depardieu in a curly wig (!) isn't going to dispel that association.