Can someone explain me the casting controversy around this film?
I've only heard a trans actor was cast as Achilles, which is, if you actually know the Illiad, a choice that absolutely makes sense.
Don't know what the other controversy is about though.
Lupita Nyong'o is black and plays Helen. The original poster in the meme thinks this would be fixed by casting the above actress who, if you've wver been to Greece, looks way more caucasian/white than your average Greek.
More model-ish than the average Greek sure, but not more caucasian. Their majority is light skinned like this. Google “Greek people faces” and you’ll see it.
They had plenty of merchant relationships across millennia with Africa and the East so they were pretty aware of other skin colours, but ancient Greece was always homogeneous. In text, they look like they were pretty indifferent to it.
But we know what they thought of as beautiful in women, and that’s from their statues of Aphrodite, which don’t have different characteristics from the general population.
Most mixing came up long after, during their occupation from the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s (and until 1800). That’s when racist slurs about darker skin started and led to the somewhat uniform skin tone of today.
That’s a myth though because DNA tests has shown Greeks have very little Turkish dna. Funnily enough it’s the other way around. People saying Greeks are not Caucasian probably have a skewed sense of the demographic. Greeks can range from extremely fair to olive but certainly not sub Saharan.
If you actually study Ancient Greece, the material culture and literary sources all say that the beauty standards for women was light skin- being pale was a sign of wealth since it meant a woman didn’t have to work outdoors. All ancient depictions of Helen of Troy thus make her pale skinned if they described her colour.
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u/SosseV 13d ago
Can someone explain me the casting controversy around this film? I've only heard a trans actor was cast as Achilles, which is, if you actually know the Illiad, a choice that absolutely makes sense.
Don't know what the other controversy is about though.