Everyone’s still boycotting Rooney Mara movies, but no-one’s boycotting Hugh Jackman ones?
(Don’t get me wrong, I love Hugh Jackman, but he was by far the biggest name attached to Pan, was in probably more of a position than most of the cast to do something about the casting and didn’t, and he’s never actually apologised for the whitewashing whilst Rooney Mara has.)
The REALLY REALLY cynical side of me thinks it’s terribly convenient how ‘boycott their next movie!’ became the approved way to deal with whitewashing culprits just as Carol was coming out, and not before or after. No-one’s boycotting Batman vs Superman, for example, even though Ben Affleck has also played a whitewashed character. (Tony Mendez in Argo.) No-one’s boycotting Wonder Woman, as far as I know, even though it’s being written by the same guy who actually wrote Pan/wrote Tiger Lily as a white woman. And Emma Stone movies remain massively popular.
But Carol – one of the very few mainstream films about lesbians – still to this day has people saying when discussions about it come up ‘oh, I’m not going to see it, because Rooney Mara once played a whitewashed character’ and no other film got that.