Recently, there has been a vocal group of people who are rather upset at the casting decision of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange. The Ancient One is a powerful and arcane entity that trains Stephen Strange. The controversy though is that the Ancient One is a Tibetan Monk in the comic and well…Tilda isn’t quite that. Marvel Studios have been responding and the latest to offer their insight is one of the scribes for Doctor Strange, C. Robert Cargill who wrote the first Sinister movie.
“The Ancient One was a racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in a very weird political place,” C. Robert Cargill stated. “He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people who think that that’s bulls**t and risk the Chinese government going, ‘Hey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political.’ If we decide to go the other way and cater to China in particular and have him be in Tibet… if you think it’s a good idea to cast a Chinese actress as a Tibetan character, you are out of your damn fool mind and have no idea what the f**k you’re talking about.” So I guess people were right in the assumption that the gender-race swap was politically motivated…but not in the way they had thought! Here the whole reason was just because they want to release Doctor Strange in China instead of closing the market while keeping the Ancient One as a racial stereotype. Perhaps Tilda will end up hanging out with Ben Kingsley? It can be the Mandarin/Ancient One Power Hour!
Doctor Strange casts a spell on the lot of us on November 4th, 2016 and stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mads Mikkelsen, and Tilda Swinton.
