The Doctor Who casting row has exposed the hypocrisy of the woke Left
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I don’t know how many viewers still enjoy Doctor Who. But I’m sure its producers do. More and more, the show feels like a deeply self-satisfied exercise in Left-wing trolling. You can just picture its producers squealing with glee, as they compete to think of ways to wind up stuffy old Tories.
“How about we get an alien to state its preferred pronouns! The Mail will be furious!” “And how about the Doctor meets Isaac Newton – and develops a gay crush on him! They’ll be so triggered!”
But the thing that delighted the producers most of all, I imagine, was a certain piece of casting. Isaac Newton was white. Yet, in last Saturday’s Doctor Who, the actor cast to play him was Nathaniel Curtis – who is mixed-race.
Ever since, Left-wing media outlets have been in their element. “Doctor Who Upsets Conservatives as Isaac Newton Played by Person of Colour,” chortled a typical headline. The Poke, a British satirical website, had great fun mocking anyone who objected. Just look at these silly gammon! Doctor Who is a work of fiction, not a documentary! It isn’t meant to be realistic!
True enough. I can’t help feeling, though, that these Left-wing outlets are missing the point. The problem is not the casting. It’s the hypocrisy. Because if the tables were turned, and a white actor were cast to play a non-white historical character, high-minded progressives would not be giggling at anyone who complained. Far from it. They’d be apoplectically denouncing it as a racist whitewashing of history.
Of course, I can’t strictly prove that, because these days there isn’t a chance in hell that a white actor would be cast as a non-white historical figure. It used to happen: for example, in the 1956 film The Conqueror, when John Wayne played the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan. And, that same year, in The Ten Commandments, when Yul Brynner played the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II.
Today, though, no sane director would dare do such a thing. In our inclusive modern world, casting is meant to be “authentic”. And not just when it comes to race. In 2018, Scarlett Johansson hastily withdrew from a film after online outrage over her casting. The character she’d been hired to play was trans – and therefore, raged her critics, the actor must be trans, too.
Perhaps she should have seen the row coming. Three years earlier, Eddie Redmayne had played a trans woman in The Danish Girl. His performance won him an Oscar nomination. Subsequently, however, the uproar over this piece of “inauthentic” casting grew to such a furious pitch that he regretted ever agreeing to it. “I made that film with the best intentions, but I think it was a mistake,” he whimpered, in 2021.
It’s not the only time he’s been in this type of trouble, either. In 2014, he was cast to play Stephen Hawking – even though Redmayne is able-bodied. “We wouldn’t accept actors blacking up,” thundered a columnist in The Guardian, “so why applaud ‘cripping up’?”
A perfectly fair question. But if, these days, we want casting to be authentic, the rules must apply to every group. Which surely means, for the sake of consistency, that white historical figures should be played by white actors. And if they aren’t, we at least shouldn’t mock those who think they should.
Still, there’s no point getting worked up about Doctor Who. After all, it’s just a bit of light-hearted fun. Anyway, there’s another new episode on Saturday, and it may yet surprise us all. Perhaps in this one, the Doctor will travel back in time to meet Mary Seacole, played by Keira Knightley. Or Muhammad Ali, played by Colin Firth.
