Controversial Casting In Film And TV

Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s casting in Alex Garland’s sci-fi movie “Annihilation” is garnering criticism from Media Action Network for Asian Americans and American Indians in Film and Television. The organization has a problem with the actresses’ casting in roles that were originally written in the novel as Asian and half-Native American, respectively.

However the film’s screenwriter and director, Garland, has pointed out that the source material by author Jeff VanderMeer features unnamed characters whose ethnicities are not described. Instead, the characters are only identified by their occupation and role in “Annihilation”. It is not until the second book in VanderMeer’s trilogy that the still-unnamed characters are described by their ethnicity.

Garland says he never read the second or third books in the series and told Nerdist “it would not be in my nature to whitewash anything. I read a book and I adapted it because I thought the book was amazing.”