Colorblind Casting: Should We Accept the Bare Minimum?
By Maria Staack
Graphic by Qashka Rulino
A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon the movie The Broken Hearts Gallery, which turned out to be the best romantic comedy I’ve seen in a long time. Having gotten tired of the current phase of too-cheesy-in-the-wrong-ways Netflix rom-coms, I was happy to watch a movie that felt like a return to the 00s—the golden age of rom-coms—with one very important difference. The Broken Hearts Gallery had everything I could want out of a rom-com: a New York City backdrop, a hot love interest, a classic friends-to-lovers story, and, best of all, a woman of color at the front and center of the action.
Geraldine Viswanathan, a woman of Indian decent, plays Lucy Gulliver, a heartbroken ex-gallery assistant aiming for success in New York City. Even though the movie doesn’t directly touch on race, I felt empowered watching a Brown woman fall in love. While it can be valuable to explore stories directly dealing with race, in my experience those stories tend to be deeply emotionally exhausting in ways movies with white characters aren’t. Even without an intentionally racialized narrative, I found it so much easier to root for Lucy because she isn’t another one of the same white girls who has appeared in countless rom-coms over several decades. Lucy is funny and bold. She is sad sometimes and happy other times. She has little quirks. She falls in love and out of love and right back in. She’s a whole person, just like you or me. She’s awesome and I’m happy she exists because we need and deserve complex women of color like her.
While looking up the backstory of Viswanathan’s casting, I discovered that the writer and director of The Broken Hearts Gallery, Natalie Krinsky was a white woman inspired by her former boss, Shonda Rhymes, to use colorblind casting. Though colorblind casting has appeared more frequently in recent years, I would argue that Shonda Rhymes popularized it. She has been responsible for such projects as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and, most recently and controversially, Bridgerton, all of which employ colorblind casting.
Whether it be about the steamy sex scenes, the historical inaccuracy of the costumes, or, the use of colorblind casting, people can’t seem to stop talking about Netflix's latest period drama series, Bridgerton. While the choice to cast non-white actors in parts originally written as white characters sits positively with some viewers, others consider its negative consequences. This method of casting grants viewers a greater representation of Black bodies on screen. So where did Bridgerton go wrong?
As I see it, the show employs revisionist history to participate in an erasure where it claims to do just the opposite. The unnecessary explanation as to why the Black characters exist as they do serves as its greatest fault. Because of a interracial marriage among high up royals, the entire trajectory of racism has ended in the world of the show. As we know today, thanks to Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, an interracial marriage probably wouldn’t have solved racism. More importantly, any suffering on the part of Black people following the Regency era gets erased, and the success of one Black man in the show is not a sufficient resolution.
In examining two different instances of colorblind casting, it is evident to me that this method of casting is completely viable when done correctly. But I certainly don’t think casting non-white people in roles written for white actors is the solution to racism. We should be rewarding non-white creatives behind the camera more frequently. However, I can’t deny how happy The Broken Hearts Gallery made me. I’m not usually a fan of accepting the bare minimum, but I think that’s at least an apt moniker for colorblind casting.