Tilda Swinton reflects on her ‘questionable decision’ to reach out to Margaret Cho

She received backlash over being cast as the Ancient One in Marvel’s 2016 film Doctor Strange.

And Tilda Swinton has reflected on her ‘questionable decision’ to reach out to actress and comedian Margaret Cho to gain understanding around the casting debate controversy.

Speaking to Variety on Wednesday, the star, 60, – who had never met Margaret – said the decision was ‘naive and clearly confusing’ and she was left feeling ’embarrassed’. 

In the superhero film — and later in Avengers: Endgame — she played The Ancient One, a character that is portrayed in the comic books as an older Asian man and Marvel Studios was accused of ‘whitewashing’ when Tilda, a white woman, took the role.  

In 2016, Margaret revealed that she was offended at being approached by Tilda after the controversy, saying that the actress ‘wanted to get my take on why all the Asian people were so mad…and it was so weird.’ 

And Tilda told Variety this week: ‘I made a questionable decision to reach out to somebody in a certain way, which was naive and clearly confusing, because their misunderstanding came about because of it. 

‘I was embarrassed that I had maybe gone up a blind alley in starting the correspondence in the first place — maybe I had confused matters — but beyond that, I have zero regrets.’

During the interview, Tilda also characterised the controversy as a ‘hot, sticky, gnarly moment’ that was uncomfortable but necessary for the industry to move forward.

She said: ‘I remember at the time having a question mark in my own mind, and being attendant to the public response to the idea that a Scottish woman will be playing this character, and being aware that there was no resistance at all — there was widespread welcome — which shifted at a certain point, for very good reasons with which I had an enormous amount of sympathy.’

She explained that a ‘conscious’ wave of criticism grew ‘righteously’, before adding: ‘The audience feels ever more empowered to contribute to the narrative and to feel heard within the narrative, and that’s a really healthy social development.’

It comes after last month Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige admitted that casting Tilda in the film was a mistake.  

Feige told Men’s Health that while they thought they were being ‘so smart’ with the casting choice at the time, he now realizes why it upset so many people.  

In the comic books, Yao, The Ancient One, is hundreds of years old and was born in  a village in Tibet.

But in the 2016 film, the Asian male character was played by Tilda as an androgynous white Celtic woman — which upset many fans at the time.

Feige says the casting choice wasn’t made lightly, even if it’s clear now that it was incorrect. 

‘We thought we were being so smart, and so cutting-edge,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to do the cliché of the wizened, old, wise Asian man.’

He realizes now, though, that it was possible to avoid playing into stereotypes without excluding Asian actors altogether.

‘It was a wake-up call to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, is there any other way to figure it out? Is there any other way to both not fall into the cliché and cast an Asian actor?’ And the answer to that, of course, is yes.’  

Critics have previously argued as much.

‘Hollywood continually abstains from opportunities to put Asians onscreen, none more egregiously than when the source material calls for them,’ wrote Rebecca Sun of The Hollywood Reporter in 2016.

‘The problem is that this solution essentially throws the baby (Asian actors) out with the bathwater (racist Asian stereotypes). Skilled filmmakers rewrite characterizations, not characters,’ she added.

Previously, director Scott Derrickson had explained the decision, arguing that they were trying to avoid stereotypes.

‘It was a challenge from the beginning that I knew I was facing with both Wong and the Ancient One being pretty bad racial stereotypes — 1960s versions of what Western white people thought Asians were like,’ he told the Daily Beast. 

‘We weren’t going to have the Ancient One as the Fu Manchu magical Asian on the hill being the mentor to the white hero. I knew that we had a long way to go to get away from that stereotype and cliché. 

So they decided to make The Ancient One a woman — but he said they ran into the problem that ‘when I envisioned that character being played by an Asian actress, it was a straight-up Dragon Lady.’

‘I know the history of cinema and the portrayal of the Dragon Lady in Anna May Wong films, and the continued stereotype throughout film history and even more in television,’ he continued. 

‘I just didn’t feel like there was any way to get around that because the Dragon Lady, by definition, is a domineering, powerful, secretive, mysterious, Asian woman of age with duplicitous motives — and I just described Tilda’s character. I really felt like I was going to be contributing to a bad stereotype.’

Tilda herself also defended her casting to IndieWire, insisting ahead of the film’s release that the backlash was just a ‘misunderstanding.’ 

‘Scott [Derrickson] will tell you that he made this very clear decision with Kevin Feige and the whole team to change The Ancient One from the rather, what they considered, offensive racial stereotype in the comic books,’ she said.

‘This kind of Fu Manchu, ancient man sitting on top of a mountain called The Ancient One. They made this decision to not perpetuate those racial stereotypes.’ 

But she thinks that people mostly got upset about her casting because it got swept into other controversial whitewashing castings of the time, including Scarlett Johansson in ‘Ghost in the Shell,.’

‘There was a moment, I think, when a couple of other films, ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and ‘The Great Wall,’ were announced when people became absolutely righteously and rightfully very motivated to speak out about what they thought about whitewashing,’ she said.

‘We got kinda pulled into that, people not necessarily knowing what the thought processes were on Dr. Strange.

‘There’s a kind of misunderstanding, which I hope the film will make clear when people see the film,’ she said.