Tilda Swinton & Margaret Cho are beefing about Doctor Strange’s whitewashing
This is a long-winded story, so buckle up. For months before Doctor Strange even came out, people were talking about the whitewashing issue, mostly around the character Tilda Swinton plays. Tilda was cast as The Ancient One, the mentor to Strange, except that in the source material (the original comics), The Ancient One is an old Tibetan man. Tilda is a white British woman. So, yeah, the role was whitewashed in the script. Tilda made statements that were basically like “Hey, I just took the role, I didn’t write it,” and she made some noise about how much she absolutely supports diversity. As it turns out, Tilda was really bothered by the criticism directed at her for taking the role. She was bothered by it enough to reach out to Margaret Cho, who was very vocal about the underrepresentation of Asian characters and Asian actors in film & TV. And Cho told the story to a podcast last week. This is how Cho originally explained their conversation:
“Tilda eventually emailed me and she said that she didn’t understand why people were so mad about Doctor Strange and she wanted to talk about it, and wanted to get my take on why all the Asian people were mad,” Margaret Cho tells Bobby Lee on his podcast TigerBelly. “It was so weird.” Lee joked, “You are the president of all Asians: American division.” “I don’t have a yellow phone under a cake dome!” Cho laughed.
Strangely enough, Swinton initially got into contact with Cho through Alex Bornstein. “She hooked us up. Which is the most ironic,” Cho said, referencing Bornstein’s infamous Asian-ish nail-salon owner character Ms. Swan during her days on MADtv. “’Is it cool if I give Tilda your number because she wants to talk to you?’ And I go all right.”
Cho and Swinton had a “long discussion,” after which Swinton told Cho not to “tell anybody.” “It was a long fight about why the part should not have gone to her. That’s what I thought: The part should not have gone to her,” said Cho. “We’d fight about it and basically it ended with her saying, ‘Well I’m producing a movie and Steven Yeun is starring.’” (This is no doubt a reference to Bong Joon-ho’s upcoming film Okja in which Swinton stars with Yeun.) “Oh, like I have a black friend,” Lee joked.
“It was weird because I felt like a house Asian, like I’m her servant,” Cho said. “Like the ones when they have in the raj, they would have the house servant who was your confidante … The servant that was close to you. That’s sort of what I felt like, like I was following her with an umbrella. I had a weird feeling about the entire exchange, especially the part of ‘Don’t tell anybody.’”
The conversation began because Cho and Lee were talking about navigating an industry where there were no other people like them. “The fact is we’re not given roles that are worthy of us,” Cho said. “We’re constantly having to wade through and do what we can.”
Obviously, this story made Tilda sound like an a—hole, but as we delve deeper into the story, I want to point out the language Cho uses: “I felt like a house Asian” and “That’s sort of what I felt like.” She’s talking about how she experienced the conversation. As it turns out, they didn’t actually speak on the phone though. They emailed, and Tilda’s rep pulled out the receipts shortly after Cho’s interview got so much attention. I’m not going to print their entire exchange – you can read the emails here at EW. Tilda absolutely asked Cho to keep their email conversation private and Tilda tries to explain her thinking behind taking the role, which was basically yeah, Marvel whitewashed the role but it was in service of trying not to make it an Asian stereotype and yay feminism because now the wisest person in the film is a (white) woman instead of a Tibetan man.
After reading through the emails, I got the feeling that Tilda’s heart was in the right place, but I also have to say… she did more explaining than acknowledging that Cho (and many Asian and Asian-American actors) have a point. It reminds me of the stories Gabrielle Union has been telling, where she calls up problematic white women like Lena Dunham and talks to them about their privilege, forcing them to actually have a conversation about it. Only in this particular case, Tilda contacted Cho to carry on some kind of dialogue and it just went sideways because, oh right, Cho isn’t the spokesperson for these issues and Tilda was basically defending a series of script and story choices she had very little to do with. They were both in entrenched positions and while this isn’t the most popular opinion on the internet, I can totally understand how Cho felt like Swinton was treating her like a “house Asian.”
After Tilda’s rep released the emails, Cho was contacted for comment and she issued this statement: “Asian actors should play Asian roles. I believe my emails stand on their own and should be taken for the spirit in which they were intended. I am grateful that the debate has now entered the national discussion and remain a huge fan of Tilda’s. Now I’m going to go fall asleep at a museum.”
Photos courtesy of WENN.
