When rumblings about a Tangled adaptation hit the internet in mid 2024, users were curious about who would play the wide-eyed lead, Rapunzel. While many actresses were mentioned, one particular name stood out: Avantika Vandanapu.
Even though casting hadn’t been revealed, the idea of Avantika playing Rapunzel pulled a surprisingly negative reaction from audiences. They called it “forced,” likening it to Tiana, the first Black Disney princess, being played by a white actress.
These two instances are completely different. Tiana’s blackness adds and elevates her story while Rapunzel’s race does not. To truly capture the difference between them, we must divulge into the cultural significance behind them.
The 2026 film “Wuthering Heights” has faced a lot of backlash from readers of the classic over director Emerald Fernell‘s choice to cast Jacob Elordi as character Heathcliff. In the original 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, Heathcliff is first described as a “dark-skinned gipsy” by narrator Mr. Lockwood. He doesn’t seem to speak English at first either as Nelly Dean, the family’s housekeeper, recalls that he spoke “some gibberish that nobody could understand.”
As the book continues on, we see Heathcliff continually described as someone with ethnic origin— a “Lascar” —the term was used for Southeast and Indian sailors at the time.
Annakate Burleson in “Race and its Impact in Wuthering Heights: From Page to Screen” claimed that “while Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial identity provided in the novel is not a puzzle to solve, in order to understand the meaning of the text in the most complete way possible, it is crucial to recognize the racism included in Brontë’s original writing…” drawing attention the the fact the novel was published a few years after slavery was abolished in England.
While his race in the book may be ambiguous and up to interpretation, it is clear that he is a non-white character whose appearance plays a critical role in his marginalization and motive throughout the story.
While “whitewashing” is regularly chastised on the internet, there is a persistent belief that diverse stories don’t sell to the majority audience, leading to white actors replacing roles specifically for people of color.
“Blackwashing,” while intended to promote diversity and anti-racism in which an originally white protagonist is played by a Black actor, is a controversial topic in many internet forums and discussions. In Disney’s 2023 film “The Little Mermaid” , Halle Bailey was cast as the main character, Ariel, daughter of Triton, to the chagrin of many online users due to the fact she was a Black woman playing the role of a fictional white-presenting mermaid.
Even in the original 1989 film, Ariel’s race had no impact on the main storyline. Director Rob Marshall and producer John DeLuca would agree, stating that “the goal was to find someone who was innocent and passionate and strong and vulnerable, and Halle had all the qualities.”
This is a clear example of colorblind casting— a casting technique that casts actors without regard to the race of the actor nor character. Colorblind casting can help foster racial inclusion and allow characters to evolve past their original or traditional depiction while helping offer more roles outside of strictly “Black” characters.
However, the topic of non-white actors playing the roles of white characters is also heavily debated within those communities.
In August Wilson’s “The Ground on which I Stand,” Wilson calls for African Americans to seize and establish their own cultural identity and create permanent, separate institutions that celebrate and embrace African American art and culture. His concern wasn’t just anti-diversity in traditionally white spaces, it was anti-assimilation into structures that don’t truly equate racial differences.
Viola Davis, a Black actress and film producer, shares a similar sentiment in her interview on The Brandon Gonez Show, in which she shares that her acting education taught her how to become “the perfect white actress.” The characters she was trained to play created dissonance with her own artistic and personal vision of the characters she wanted to play. She believes that Black actors deserve roles that are written for them; not rewritten white roles or token representation.
While it is true that communities, especially those who are marginalized, misrepresented, or underrepresented, should have spaces that are solely their own, limiting them to these categories can lead to them being underutilized or even contribute to racial stereotypes that discredit an actor’s ability.
In a study by UCLA’s 2025 Hollywood Diversity Report, they found that in the streaming film leads of 2024, white actors made up 49 percent of film protagonists with Black people at 18 percent and Asian and Latinx actors being less than 10 percent. Although our society has made progress, it is still clear white actors are offered more opportunities when it comes to film and show productions.
I don’t want to dictate what roles should go to which actors, however, we need to be spaces for those who might not see themselves reflected in the liberal arts space. For the entertainment industry, color-conscious casting should not force someone to turn their back on their history and disregard cultural significance, but instead offer and ensure access to these talented performers.
