Go south and east, HollywoodSouth and east Asian actors may be enjoying higher profiles in the US on the small screen, but in mainstream films they haven't moved far away from comedy sidekicks and stereotypes
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No laughing matter … Kal Penn and John Cho in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/New Line
No sooner had the BBC told us that south Asian actors had never had it so good in the US – more recognition, higher-profile roles – than Variety came along to crush that bright-eyed optimism into bitter, scowl-making resentment.
In one survey of the state-of-Asian-actors-in-Hollywood, there's excitement and hope: the last decade has seen a steady emergence of faces, if not memorable than at least vaguely familiar, with significant telly parts in ER, Lost and Heroes. Brown faces are making it big(gish). Hooray! In the other, there's weary hand-wringing at the persistent lack of awards acknowledgement for south – and indeed east Asian – actors in film, despite cross-cultural epics such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Babel otherwise being nominated for gongs across the board.
Variety's Andrew Barker narrows in on the success of Slumdog Millionaire to hammer home the point. "The film won eight Oscars out of 10 nominations in every conceivable category," he says. "Every category that is, except for acting ones." Which might have been a much stronger point were he not using Dev Patel and Freida Pinto as case studies, but still, the underlying message holds true: with the notable exception of Rinko Kikuchi (whose wordless performance in Babel earned her an Oscar nom in 2004), not a single actor of Asian descent has been able to pull off in this decade what Haing S Ngor did back in 1985.
And yet, neither picture seems to be quite accurate or fair. It's as premature to herald an all-conquering, all-triumphant coming of age for a generation of Asian actors as it is to wag a critical finger at the Academy voters for not showing these young hopefuls their due. If only reality were so black and white and didn't straddle an unsexy grey patch somewhere in the middle.
The fact remains that there is a dire lack of roles for actors of either ethnic origin, and a tinier proportion still offering a part not limited to a cardboard cutout stereotype of ethnicity. Instead, the Hollywood film factory upholds a tradition of using male Indian characters with funny accents as comedy aides every now and again (see Peter Sellers's Hrundi V Bakshi, everything Kumar Pallana has done with Wes Anderson, the potty-mouthed shop clerk in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Apu from The Simpsons. To a slightly lesser degree: Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit 1 and 2).
There's even an east Asian equivalent, epitomised by Burt Kwouk's Cato in the Pink Panther films, Data in The Goonies (Ke Huy Quan reprising pretty much the same role he had in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a year earlier) and the entire Hollywood career of Jackie Chan. Asian women, who are near-invisible, presumably fare worse for not conforming to the western movie model of leading, or even supporting, lady looks.
That the Harold and Kumar franchise remains the first and last big-screen box-office success to offer major roles to actors of south and east Asian origin says something about the state of mainstream film-making. Namely, that we really need more ambitious screenwriters and braver producers (and also that serious and worthy judging panels will just never dig comedy weed freaks). Now, if only someone would write the Oscar-baiting part of a disturbed Asian with Asperger's, who makes some sort of redemptive, tear-jerking journey, then Kal Penn might be in with a chance.
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