Believe it or not, I have some experience in this area. It's been more than a decade and a half since my last performance on stage. It's also been a while since I've performed on camera; but, I've been either acting, or working with actors, for more than twenty years now.
The thing is, this push that way too many people are making, and even more are capitulating to, that actors shouldn't be playing against type, is just as insane as I'm making it out to be. It's also grossly incoherent, and thoughtless. It's also illustrative of how intellectually vacant the woke, illiberal Left is.
Even someone I used to date palmed me over a positive review of A Quiet Place. Her reasoning was that non-deaf actors were playing deaf characters. This is, of course, false. There's one deaf character in the movie, and the actress who played her is really deaf. She clearly hadn't seen the movie. She just drew her conclusion that the equivalent to blackface was being committed, in her mind, and she went with it.
I thought that she was just the stupidest person that I ever had the displeasure of dating for a while; but, I'm realizing that she's far from alone.
Blackface seems to be the go-to for these people. Every time an actor takes a role that these intellectually challenged people think should go to someone else, they just keep evoking blackface, as if that's a catch-all. Of course, Laurence Olivier's Othello probably doesn't exist in most of their brains. It's impossible for them to see any difference between Birth of a Nation, Othello (1964), and Tropic Thunder.
The reality is that, this mentality is a greased precipice. There's no way to placate these people that doesn't lead to the death of performing arts.
Let's go to another Millicent Simmonds film, Wonderstruck. Again, she's a deaf actress playing a deaf character; but, her costar wasn't deaf and he played a deaf character. In this case, his character lost his hearing during the course of the story; so, the filmmakers needed a hearing actor who could pretend to be deaf.
This is broadly relevant because, well, disabled people lack certain abilities. That's why you can't cast an actual blind person to play Daredevil. That's why, in a movie like Hush, it's impractical to cast an actress who's actually deaf -- if you're performing a fight scene, and something gets dangerous, you can't just yell "Cut!" and stop it.
This isn't the same thing as blackface. Blackface is also an insane thing to evoke when even Daniel Kaluuya got a few jabs for his role in Get Out because he's not an American black man.
It's amazing that these people haven't taken umbrage with Denzel Washington playing a Scott, or with the thousands of British men who have played Hamlet -- "Well, he's not really Danish!"
Most of the actors who played skinheads in American History X were Jewish. Literally none of the actors who played gay characters in Milk were gay in real life. Gary Oldman isn't really fat; but, he wore a fat suit to play Winston Churchill -- apparently that was fine; but, Brendan Fraser is basically doing blackface in The Whale, right?
Seriously, what's your fucking philosophy? What is your reasoning? Are you gonna write an op-ed about how Schindler's List hasn't aged well because Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes aren't really German, and Ben Kingsley isn't Jewish? Are we gonna bury Gandhi because Ben Kingsley is only part Indian? Are we gonna start barring screenings of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly because Eli Wallach wasn't really Mexican? Al Pacino has been playing Shylock on stage for several years without being a real Jew from Venice, are you gonna tell us that we can't see that because he's basically doing blackface?
Actors wear makeup and costumes in order to play people that they're not. That's the whole craft. There is no performance art that exists without this craft, and this process. You can't just focus on individual performances and flip your lid about them, without actually explaining where you're coming from philosophically.
The thing is, that's been the great weapon of the woke mob -- constant intimidation, coupled with vagueness. It's a perpetual Motte and Bailey. It has to be because, if they ever tried to articulate the core of their philosophy, it would be stupid or horrifying.