“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.”
