Ridley Scott Casts White Men To Play Egyptians, Explains His Choices BY ERIC EISENBERG

Despite the fact that Ridley Scott's new
movie Exodus: Gods and Kings in largely set
in ancient Egypt, you'll notice that the cast of
lead actors is basically completely dominated
by white dudes. Bringing the titular biblical
story to life will be the likes of Christian Bale
as Moses and Joel Edgerton as Ramses.
Over the past few months, the movie has
been dealing with a bit of controversy due to
this aspect - some moviegoers claiming
"whitewashing" - and as a result
representatives for the movie, like Edgerton ,
have had to explain why the casting was
handled the way it was. Now the film's
director is finally weighing in with his point of
view on the matter, and one of the ways he's
doing so is by pointing at some interesting
information about the real-life demographics
of the story's setting.
Ridley Scott's comments come to us from
Yahoo! Australia , where a Q&A with the
filmmaker reveals why he felt the need to put
together what is referred to as a
"international cast." In his explanation, the
Oscar-nominated director made note that
that the country of Egypt at the time had
diverse populace due to the fact that it was
smack dab right in the middle of the growing
world, between Africa, the Middle East and
Europe. Said Scott,
"We cast major actors from
different ethnicities to reflect this
diversity of culture, from Iranians
to Spaniards to Arabs. There are
many different theories about the
ethnicity of the Egyptian people,
and we had a lot of discussions
about how to best represent the
culture."
That said, looking at other parts of the
interview suggest that the idea of ethnicity
perhaps didn't play that big of a role in
Scott's mind when casting Christian Bale as
Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings . Instead,
the filmmaker said that he met the Welsh
actor "four or five years ago" and that at that
point they immediately knew that they
wanted to work together. Scott thought of
Bale for Moses when he began thinking about
the character as being a larger than life figure
who needed to be played as a "real person."
Likewise, he says that he first saw Joel
Edgerton work during tryouts for Kingdom of
Heaven .
Had Ridley Scott been directly asked about
not casting Middle Eastern actors to play
Moses and Ramses his answers to questions
about Bale and Edgerton may have been
different, but what I gather from this
interview is that the director wasn't really
looking at race when he was finding his leads
- he was just looking at talent. He likens
putting the cast together as being similar to
putting together a talented soccer team,
saying that he requires strong partnerships.
But is that enough of an explanation?