Bradley Cooper's Maestro Continues Hollywood's Whitewashing Problem

screenrant.com:

Actor Bradley Cooper will play Leonard Bernstein in the late composer’s upcoming biopic Maestro, a controversial move that continues Hollywood’s problematic practice of casting white actors in minority roles. The film industry has become more diverse and inclusive over the years, but unfortunately continue plenty of harmful practices, such as whitewashing. Bradley Cooper, a white actor, will don a prosthetic nose and play a historic Jewish composer, which is not only the latest instance of Hollywood’s whitewashing but also part of the industry’s enduring erasure of Jewish creatives.

Whitewashing, the practice of casting a white actor in a non-white role, has been around as long as the film industry itself, blocking performances from Black, Asian, Jewish, and Latinx actors and actresses. Whitewashing is a symptom of institutional racism, and although progress has been made in recent years to allow marginalized groups to tell their own stories, the film industry still slips into old habits. A particularly problematic and unfortunately popular trend that persists to this day is casting white (or otherwise non-Jewish) performers as Jewish characters, with Bradley Cooper’s upcoming role as Leonard Bernstein being one of the most recent and offensive examples.

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Bradley Cooper, as shown in production photos for Maestro, will don a prosthetic nose to mimic Leonard Bernstein’s Levantine features in Maestro, despite there being plenty of Jewish actors better-suited to the role. Casting a white actor as a Jewish historical figure or fictional character is intrinsically disrespectful (as it would be for a white actor to play the role of any other racial or ethnic