![]() ![]() There are five major heroes in our story and he is one of them - the other four are all Chinese,” Yimou says in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. The arrival of his character in our story is an important plot point. ![]() “Matt Damon is not playing a role that was originally conceived for a Chinese actor. He says the movie’s narrative couldn’t be further from a white-savior story: “For the first time, a film deeply rooted in Chinese culture, with one of the largest Chinese casts ever assembled, is being made at tentpole scale for a world audience,” Yimou says, explaining that Damon’s character was always intended to be white. “Now, less than a year later, the man who lectured the African-American producer Effie Brown over the limits of diversity in Hollywood is the face of a film that embodies all of the industry’s worst tendencies, by yet again putting a white American actor at the center of another culture’s story.” Matt Damon, an Atlantic reader, is not happy about this piece in particular - more on this later.Īugust 4, 2016: Director Zhang Yimou defends The Great Wall and Damon’s casting. “Damon is, by all accounts, a well-meaning guy with left-leaning politics, but he’s already once been embroiled in a debate over Hollywood’s institutional racism after a much-discussed episode of his HBO filmmaking show Project Greenlight,” Sims writes. Sims revisits Damon’s earlier Project Greenlight imbroglio, in which the actor lectured Effie Brown, a black woman producer with years of experience in Hollywood, about how to fix the industry’s diversity problem. Others, including Shonda Rhimes and Kerry Washington, praise her comments.Īugust 2, 2016: Shortly after Wu’s critique, The Atlantic’s David Sims posts a longer take. ![]() In subsequent tweets, Wu clarifies that she wasn’t blaming Damon or the studio, but only posted her message to spread awareness about how often Asian identities are erased. July 29, 2016: Fresh Off the Boat star Constance Wu slams Damon’s casting on Twitter: “We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that white man can save the world,” Wu writes. July 28, 2016: After the film makes it through production unmarked by controversy, the first Great Wall teaser sets off the white-savior debate in earnest. As a result, Damon has spent much of his press tour for the film defending it, and begging us to believe he’s not the bad guy here. It’s a goofy premise, but since the movie’s first trailer, it’s been the subject of controversy over its white-savior narrative, a story in which one heroic white man saves the day for people of color. When The Great Wall is released on Friday, audiences everywhere will get to see Matt Damon protect the Great Wall of China from an army of gnarly monsters. Matt Damon, right, and Pedro Pascal in The Great Wall. ![]()
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