The Cringiest Examples of Whitewashing in Movies

The Entire Cast of The Last Airbender 

Director M. Night Shyamalan hit rock bottom with The Last Airbender. Fortunately, he’s started to pick up the pieces of his career and has gotten back in the saddle, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he wrecked this adaptation of the beloved cartoon series. For the film, he cast white actors and actresses in the roles of characters with names like Aang, Katara, and Sokka, all of whom were definitely supposed to be Asian or Pacific Islanders in the original material. It was a terrible film in general, but the whitewashing made it unwatchable (especially because they weren’t even talented actors). 

Tonto in The Lone Ranger 

Let’s make something very clear right now, according to Johnny Depp’s official IMDb page, he is not Native American. In fact, he’s really, REALLY white. So, casting him to play one of the few characters that was always meant to be one of the more positive portrayals of Native Americans in entertainment was a huge “no-no.” Toss in the fact that Depp tried to implement his own brand of quirkiness for the role and Tonto quickly went from being simply off-putting to downright offensive. I can’t speak for the Native American community, but I imagine this would be like me seeing an English actor play an Irish character as a stumbling drunk munching on a potato with a dozen kids.

Allison Ng in Aloha 

There are a lot of cultural issues with the movie Aloha. That’s a conversation for another time though. Right now, I’m more concerned with the character Allison Ng. In the book, she’s described as being Chinese, Hawaiian, and Swedish. In the movie, the role is played by Emma Stone, who is neither Chinese nor Hawaiian. She is part Swedish though, so I guess there’s that. Now, I understand that Stone is a go-to-gal for romance movies these days, but who the hell cast a ginger as someone who is supposed to be Chinese and Native Hawaiian in 2015!?! There are so many talented Asian American actresses in Hollywood right now that this casting is simply inexcusable. 

(Almost) The Entire Cast of Gods of Egypt 

I remember hearing the backlash around the whitewashing in Gods of Egypt when trailers for the film first dropped. Look, I’m not going to indulge anyone with a debate about deities not technically having an ethnicity and simply take on a physical form to appear before mortals. The fact is that if you’re going to make a movie about Egyptian Gods, you damn well better make sure they look like they reflect Africans since they’re the ones that created them in the first place! Gerard Butler, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Rachael Blake definitely do not fit the description in any way, shape, or form. 

“Dishonorable” Mention: Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder

After all this, I figured we could use a so-called “dishonorable” mention when it comes to whitewashing. By that, I’m referring to Robert Downey Jr as the fictional actor Kirk Lazarus. In the film, the white actor undergoes controversial surgical procedures to appear black in order to play the role of an African American soldier in a fictional film. A while ago some Gen Zs found out about the part and tried to condone RDJ for blackface. The thing is that the character is meant to make a point about how inappropriate, cringy, and ridiculous blackface is. They point out several times in the movie that they should have cast a black actor, and that Kirk Lazarus should definitely not be playing the part, especially in blackface. That makes him a refreshingly “appropriate” example of blackface in movies (never thought I would say that…).

I could go on and on with instances of whitewashing in movies, but those are the ones that stood out the most to me. Let me know which one you thought was the cringiest from the examples above in the comments below, and feel free to share other characters that were brutally whitewashed by Hollywood. Who knows, I might just take the time to pull together another collection of cases in the future. That is if I can bear the cringe.