But as big a star as Elba is, was anyone auditioning him when he was in his 30s to play Mr. And sure, he has the detective miniseries Luther, as well as a place in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, to console him. That's a question Idris Elba has been fielding for so long that he has more or less aged out of contention. Pop Culture Happy Hour Idris Elba: The Man Who Is Luther, Was Stringer, And Could Be James Bond Anthony Hopkins played him on television in 1981 to general acclaim. Laurence Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for playing him in blackface in 1965. Orson Welles was one of many white actors to play the Moor in blackface on film and television more than a century after Aldridge. When the great African American actor Paul Robeson played Othello in the 1930s, he was the exception, not the rule. Times would change, casting choices too, but slowly. The reaction? British critics had a problem with Aldridge's Othello because of his race(!) - in the absence of Black English actors, they'd grown accustomed to the Moor being played as a light-skinned Arab. Would it surprise you to know that it took more than two centuries before the part was played in England by a Black actor? New Yorker Ira Aldridge was the first, having relocated to London because in the early 1800s, Black actors couldn't get work on American stages. Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona at the Shubert Theatre in New York City on Oct. New York magazine critic John Simon did not see this scene, having pointedly declined to attend the symposium, but he told NPR's Carole Zimmer at the time that the whole notion struck him as ridiculous. And it presented scenes designed to help theater- makers consider other possibilities: in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for instance, James Earl Jones as Southern patriarch Big Daddy, opposite white actor Stephen Collins as his son Brick. In 1986, when the performers union Actors' Equity convened the first National Symposium on Non-Traditional Casting, it noted that more than 90% of actors who had been hired in the U.S. Inclusion became Hamilton's calling card, and diverse audiences soon made it a worldwide phenomenon, an outcome that seems natural in retrospect but that flew in the face of decades of theater practice. "Every time I write a piece of theater, I'm trying to get us on the board." because hip-hop is a Black art form and, also, it's our country too." "And it's incredibly meaningful to then populate our live show with Black and brown artists. "Hip-hop was uniquely suited to telling Hamilton's immigrant narrative," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross. Movie Interviews 'The Past Isn't Done With Us,' Says 'Hamilton' Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda And why would he be? Live theater has always assumed the audience can make imaginative leaps, whether it's depicting a deus ex machina, a warrior king who rants or Founding Fathers who rap. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not a choice a playwright would make if he were worried about verisimilitude in casting. In the fifth century B.C., when the Greek playwright Aeschylus needed a top-notch defense attorney for his leading tragedian in the trilogy The Oresteia, he settled on the god Apollo. Audiences have a long history of suspending disbelief What Mangan could have added is that social media dithering over these announcements is at best misguided, since cross-cultural casting is about as old as casting itself. A post shared by Fable Pictures what it's worth," wrote The Guardian's Lucy Mangan in a review of that last opus, "I am aware that Anne Boleyn wasn't black, but I'm also aware that she wasn't Claire Foy, Merle Oberon, Helena Bonham Carter or any of the other women who have played her over the years, and my brain is not unduly upset by any of it."
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