Casting Anne Boleyn
- Chris Maunder
- Jun 21, 2021
- 5 min read
Was Anne Boleyn black? The answer, based on portraits of her, is no. But the question relates to the current Channel 5 series on the story of Anne Boleyn, in which she is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, a British actor of Jamaican parentage, now based in the United States. I have come across people who are frustrated at the portrayal of this famous English Queen by a black actor. We can’t relate to her, they say, because we know that Anne Boleyn wasn’t really black. It’s just a stunt caused by reaction to ‘Black Lives Matter’, they say, it's political correctness. Another grumble is that white female actors would never be allowed to play, say, Aretha Franklin or Winnie Mandela. Do these complaints have any justification? Are we right to be disconcerted when someone plays a famous person who was not of the same race?
The question is interesting as well as challenging. The Smithsonian magazine website, from which the above picture is taken, argue that 'the controversy over a black actress playing Anne Boleyn is unnecessary and harmful' (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/who-was-first-woman-color-bring-anne-boleyns-story-screen-180977882/). They remind us that Merle Oberon, of mixed British, Sri Lankan, and Maori heritage, played Anne Boleyn back in 1933. Oberon had to keep her racial background quiet and bleached her skin.
This issue is familiar to people in the world of Christian Theology. This is because we are aware that images of Jesus, Mary, and the disciples in the European Christian tradition have been dominated by portraits of people who are clearly Caucasian, often with fair hair and blue eyes. This is historically incorrect; Jesus was Semitic and probably brown skinned with dark eyes. These fair skinned images reflected colonial attitudes. Today, fortunately, there are also images of Jesus as African, or East Asian or Native American, etc. This variety could be seen as a way of expressing that Jesus is within us all, whatever race we are; we don’t need a historically correct Jesus. Indeed, black actors have played Jesus on film.
The other area in Theology where the issue of representation crops up is in the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence that a priest has to be male, because Jesus was male and the priest is his representative when administering the sacraments, such as consecrating the bread and wine in the re-enactment of the Last Supper. However, critics of this conservative position ask, Why then aren’t the priests bearded, about thirty years old, brown skinned, and Jewish? The point they are making is that gender does not need to be the single determinative reason as to whether a person can or cannot represent Jesus. And this same Church that wants priests to be male like Jesus is where you find most of the fair skinned Jesuses! Oops.
These same questions relate to the casting of Anne Boleyn. Why do race and skin colour need to be the determinative factors in casting the actor? What about personality, height, tone of voice, bearing, and – most important of all – the ability to act? The makers of the Channel 5 series have made this point: they say that Jodie Turner-Smith is exactly the kind of feisty, attractive, and intelligent woman that Anne Boleyn is believed to have been. Her skin colour is inconsequential.
The Channel 5 casting challenges our perception of race as ‘them’ and ‘us’. What unites four white people: one from Britain, one from Portugal, one from Finland, and one from Bulgaria? Very little, except that they are all human beings. The only thing that might unite them is a common perception that their whiteness somehow gives them a common bond. But does it? The same thing could be said about people of African heritage from the USA, Brazil, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The only thing that unites them is the perception of those who lump them all together as if they were all the same, and the discrimination that they consequently suffer in common. And white racism has lumped together even more unlike people: African, South Asian, Indigenous Australian.
We need to start seeing different ‘races’ – a very fluid concept, as DNA analysis suggests – as being like in kind to people who have differing shades of skin or hair colour. We need to stop noticing. Within the collection of people called ‘white British’, there is a wide variety of shade, even between people in the same family. It really isn’t an issue. You don’t start getting worked up because your company seems to be taking on a lot of people with freckles, or because most people who have recently moved into your street have light brown hair. A century ago, British people got excited about there being too many Irish moving into their neighbourhoods. Yet the descendants of those same Irish people are now so wholly integrated that one doesn’t even think about whether someone called O’Connor or MacNamara might be ‘one of them’, or whether the dominance of Ant and Dec on TV (both with Irish ancestry) heralds some kind of cultural takeover.
If you ask, ‘Why is Anne Boleyn black?’, Channel 5 can come straight back and respond, ‘Why did you notice?’ And that is the real question. Why did you notice? What colour was Anne Boleyn's hair: were Scarlett Johannsson, Natalie Dormer, or Claire Foy, all of whom have played Anne in recent years, a good match? Actually, the white bloke playing Henry VIII doesn’t look anything like the famous Holbein portrait of Henry. Oh heck, I wish I hadn’t spotted that - it’s completely ruined the programme for me!
And so, why not a white actor playing Aretha Franklin? Yes, why not? The answer to that might lie not in the philosophy of casting actors, but in the availability of roles for people of different ethnicities. Do white actors get more parts? This is the one instance where we do need to notice: when people of various ethnicities, or genders, or sexual preferences are being discriminated against. That is why we get asked those questions about race and other aspects of our identity on all those forms.
And so casting a black woman in a white role might not be the same thing as casting a white woman in a black role. This is analogous to male actors in Shakespeare’s day playing female roles, which meant that women didn’t get a look in when it came to acting. If white actors played black roles in a world where black actors got fewer opportunities, than this would exacerbate the imbalance. But that doesn’t mean that, in principle and all things being equal (which they rarely are), a white person couldn’t play a black role just as Jodie Turner-Smith can take the part of Anne Boleyn.
We can hope for the day when each and every one of us stops noticing and being concerned about what racial origin people might have. Until then, people involved in casting should continue taking the lead in provoking us to think differently about race, just as they have been doing for decades in casting black actors as judges, police chiefs, presidents, etc. in a time when these positions seemed barred to black people in real life. And then suddenly we noticed that the fiction was becoming reality. Did those on-screen roles help to facilitate the removal of some of the racial barriers? I think so.
And so, having sorted all that out, I can sit back, relax, and enjoy Anne Boleyn. I still wonder why her husband, the most murderous thug in the history of the English monarchy, gets so much air time, but that is another issue. Who’s your vote for the black actor who gets to play him?
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