Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
I'm sorry that the controversy over Gerard Depardieu's casting to play Alexandre Dumas, who was biracial, is getting more coverage than the fact that the movie has the potential to be fantastic. It's focusing on the relationship between Dumas and one of his most significant collaborators, Auguste Maquet, who helped him write, among other works, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. There's significant, wonderful drama there: Maquet was excluded from the title pages of the works he helped Dumas with, a significant slight, but he ended up quite well-off, while Dumas died bankrupt after an extraordinarily, happily profligate life.
That said, the racial controversy over the casting decision is, I think, significant. The producers, idiotically, said they didn't think they could find a black or mixed-race actor who could both play Dumas and be as significant a draw as Depardieu. Anytime someone says something like that, it's pretty clear evidence that they're not trying hard enough. But I do think there are some interesting questions to consider about casting for biracial characters, something I think will be more and more common as racial lines continue to blur (and of course, there will be more mixed-race actors, too). Dumas, for example, had blue eyes and a somewhat dark complexion. Depardieu has blue eyes. Would the situation be better if a black or mixed-race actor had been cast to play Dumas, but worn contacts? Would the controversy be less if Depardieu was tanning rather than wearing makeup?
I don't know that I have the answers to any of these questions. But like Dumas, I agree that folks who make racial assumptions, whether it's about the availability of qualified black actors, or about the abilities of a mixed-race author, only end up hurting themselves. As Dumas once said to a man who insulted him on the basis of his race, "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."