“The Social Network” opened last week to rave reviews, Oscar buzz and a big box office. This is the type of movie that actors give their right arms to star in.
Given the movie is at least loosely based on the Facebook story, there is an Indian character that plays an integral role in the narrative: Divya Narendra, a Harvard student who tussled with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg.
An Indian doesn’t play Mr. Narendra in the movie. Instead, he is played by Max Minghella, who has Italian, Scottish and Chinese ancestry, according to his Wikipedia profile posted on http://www.maxminghella.com/
This past summer, “Prince of Persia” and “Airbender,” two big-budget Hollywood movies, caused a stir by casting white actors in the roles of South Asian and Middle Eastern actors. The producers of those movies explained the casting by saying these were movies based on video games and comics where the ethnicity of the characters isn’t known. That explanation was more plausible with Airbender, where no ethnicities are mentioned in the comics, than the descriptively named Prince of Persia.
But The Social Network is a movie based on real people. Mr. Narendra is of Indian descent. In an interview, he said he was “initially surprised to see a white actor play him on screen.”
A Google search turns up a picture of Mr. Narendra next to Mr. Minghella. The differences are striking. Mr. Minghella, son of the legendary director Anthony Minghella, is significantly shorter and he appears to weigh a fair bit less. He also looks significantly lighter-skinned than Mr. Narendra.
Which brings up another issue. Many photographs not related to The Social Network show Mr. Minghella as a rather pale young man. But in pictures of him as Mr. Narendra, he appears darker. There’s another one that puts all the cast members together with their real-life personae; in this one, Messrs. Narendra and Minghella appear to have about the same complexion.
Was make-up used to darken Mr. Minghella for the part? A spokesman for Sony Pictures said in an email it was not.
Good, because we don’t need white actors deliberately darkened to play Indians.
But here’s the real question: Why was Mr. Narendra played by Mr. Minghella in the first place?
We are not questioning Mr. Minghella’s acting talent. But there are plenty of Indian-origin actors to play the roles of Indians in movies. Kal Penn, Aziz Ansari, Maulik Pancholy, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Manu Narayan, Adhir Kalyan and Naveen Andrews are all actors who could potentially have played Mr. Narendra.
Pat Moran, an Emmy-winning casting director, says in an interview that in general those in charge of casting try to match the ethnicity of the actor with the ethnicity of the character.
“As a casting director, I would look like an idiot if I sent you a Caucasian for an Indian role,” he told me. “If I am casting a role for a Hispanic character, my obligation is to go through all the Hispanic actors I know, before I go to other characters.”
The Sony spokesman declined to comment on why Mr. Minghella was chosen to play Mr. Narendra or whether actors should be ethnically matched to their roles. But he noted, “The person who loves Max in the movie the most is the real Divya Narendra.”
Efforts to reach Mr. Minghella were unsuccessful.
It is ironic that the makers of a film about Facebook couldn’t find an actor of Indian descent to play Mr. Narendra out of the 20 million-plus Indians on Facebook. They had pictures right in front of them.
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