Some authors are proprietary about their characters; some readers even more so, which is partly why Stephen King’s novel “Misery” and the subsequent film were such successes.
When the casting for the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire” was announced, author Anne Rice balked at the idea of Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, the antihero of the novel who becomes the main character in the subsequent books in the “Vampire Chronicles” series.
When the AMC series “Interview With the Vampire” bowed Oct. 2, some fans balked at the casting of Jacob Anderson, a Black actor, as Louis, “Interview’s” main character, and the updating of the setting to the Black Storyville section of New Orleans in the 1910s, instead of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation. Louis, they argued, wasn’t Black but white. How could the series change the essence of the character? (We should note that Rice, who died in 2021, was slated to be a producer of the series.) I would argue the new series didn’t fundamentally change the character, but it’s complicated.
“Interview” is just the latest work to recast stories featuring white characters with minority performers. The so-called high arts, which are all about hyper or superrealism and require a corresponding technique, have always been color-blind. No one cares if a 40-something Black soprano sings Madama Butterly. She’s a 15-year-old geisha singing in Italian anyway. Any semblance to everyday reality went out the window with the libretto.
Similarly, no one cares if the Swan Queen is an Asian ballerina. If she can’t do those 32 fouettes in the third, Black swan act of “Swan Lake.” forget about it. And anyway, she’s a swan, isn’t she?
But movies, TV, even theater are supposed to be more realistic. Still, they’re not documentaries. And yet, they must retain the essence of their fictional and historical subjects. What makes “Hamilton” brilliant is that it let’s in people formerly marginalized by out society while at the same time remaining true to the personalities and relationships of the Founding Fathers. I never thought I was watching less than the men and women who shaped the fate of the United States.
In other instances, why shouldn’t actors of color play the great roles? The families in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” now on Broadway with an all-Black cast, or Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” done years ago at Purchase College with Ossie Davis, wife Ruby Dee and son Guy Davis, are families like any other, struggling with money and the currency of love. You see past the color of their skin to what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the content of their character,” to their souls.
“Interview” — which began as a short story that Rice developed in her grief over the loss of her 5-year-old daughter Michele to leukemia, a blood disease — would become a metaphor for gay sex and AIDS in the 1980s. So it’s no surprise it would metamorphose today into the story of a gay Black man struggling for acceptance in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South. His struggles, the struggles society foists on him, make his vulnerability to someone like Lestat (Sam Reid) — less of the hero he becomes in the later books — much more intelligible. In any event, even if Louis were still a white guy, he could not in today’s cultural climate be a plantation owner, as he is in the 1976 novel and the film, without the adapters addressing the issue of slavery, which would take the story out of the realm of erotic escape and destroy any sympathy you might have for Louis.
You can’t unring the bell. We live in a different world, one that is sensitive to any perceived racism. Not that “Interview” is in any way racist. But a slave owner, no matter how complex, can’t be a heroic, sympathetic figure.
And for the same reason, while minorities may appropriate white roles, the reverse is no longer possible. It’s about power, and the power dynamic has shifted, at least in the more liberal world of the arts and the mainstream media. Those white people who mourn that seismic shift would do well to remember the ancestors who abused their power, never understanding that with entitlement and abuse inevitably must come the acknowledgement of responsibility and karmic comeuppance.