#topic: representation

[holbyfess]

[asamnetwork]

From Superhero Shows to Soaps, South Asian Actors Are Taking Over TV

The Greatest American Hero [featuring Hannah Simone] seems like a safe bet for a fall pickup. “Hannah was one of the most sought-after actresses this year. She had multiple offers on the table,” says Claudia Lyon, V.P. of talent and casting at ABC Studios, in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “The broadcast networks need to appeal to broad audiences. So when you cast Hannah Simone, that’s like a game changer...”

It can feel like the surge in South Asian representation on TV happened suddenly—“but it’s definitely been a process in the time that I’ve been working in television,” Lyon says. (x)

[constancewudaily]

Over the summer, [Wu] grabbed headlines by using Twitter to publicly criticize the big-budget film The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon, for continuing “the repeatedly implied racist notion that white people are superior to POC [people of color] and that POC need salvation from our own color via white strength.”

Not at all shy about expressing these kinds of views, Wu instead says she finds conversations like these freeing, and could’ve benefited from hearing them more when she was an up-and-coming performer. Wu began acting in local theater productions as a child in Virginia. And although there were few women who looked like her on TV and in movies, Wu says she was “mercifully blind to the systematic limitations.” This may sound like bliss, but, Wu explains, “I don’t think it’s possible for it not to have affected me, but it was unconscious and therefore maybe a little more dangerous. When the effect is unconscious you can’t put a name to it and you deal with self-blame and think it’s only you, and not the world doing this.” 

[holbyfess]

[holbyfess]

[holbyfess]

continued: Saying 'well that isn't why they split' isn't good enough. No representation is better than bad representation.

[holbyfess]

[asamnetwork]

The Exorcist: How John Cho is changing American horror

[John Cho will] do whatever he can to help the push for Asian-American representation. It’s one reason he joined the second season of The Exorcist... “I had not seen Asian faces in American horror, and it kind of tickled me to want to change that visual vocabulary a bit,” he says. “I thought it would be, I don’t know, intrusive to have my face in it...”

“What I’ve been thinking about lately is how to tell stories that are specifically Asian-American but aren’t necessarily about being Asian-American as much,” he explains. “I’m looking at the totality of things.”(x)