Michael Sheen shows the bland future of woke casting

May 10, 2023

Guff about only playing characters with whom you share a lived experience only crops up as an excuse for "positive" discrimination

Until this morning I had no idea that Tony Blair was a boyo from the valleys who cut his political teeth at Tredegar working men's club or somesuch, that Brian Clough learned his craft running up and down the touchline of football clubs in rural Wales, nor that before taking on Richard Nixon David Frost honed the art of the interviewer in his native country as a young reporter on South Wales Tonight.

I still have some doubts, but I guess they must all be Welsh because they are all people who have been willingly portrayed by Michael Sheen – and there is no way he would do that when he appears to think it is wrong for actors to take roles of a different nationality from their own.

"You know, seeing people playing Welsh characters who are not Welsh, I find, it's very hard for me to accept that," he says in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. Therefore, no English actors playing Welsh people – and vice versa.

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick? The more I think about it, the more I begin to think that the rules of authentic casting only work in one direction.

Members of "privileged" groups may not play members of aggrieved minorities – but there is no such prohibition applied to aggrieved minorities playing members of privileged groups. Indeed, when they do, in dramas such as Bridgerton or Hamilton, not only is it acceptable, it is all terribly enlightened. The guff about only playing characters with whom you share a lived experience only crops up as an excuse for applying a policy which is really just "positive" discrimination for political purposes.

To be fair to Sheen he is hardly the worst offender in this respect. Indeed, read on and he appears to regret a future in which Richard III would only be allowed to be played by an actor with a genuine spinal condition. But the point is that he goes meekly along with the whole idea of authentic casting – as indeed do most actors who want a career. Few would dare to challenge the woke consensus which has settled around acting, as around many professions.

But how much more impressive it would be Sheen could have brought himself to say: I’m Welsh but I played Tony Blair – so what? That's the whole point of being an actor, isn't it? To transfer yourself from your own skin to someone else's?

If you really want a part to be played by someone who shares Blair's lived experience you would have to ask, well, Tony Blair himself. He seems to have a lot of time on his hands nowadays, after all. Instead, acting gets dragged down the route of blatantly political casting because no-one dares speak out. How powerful is the threat of cancellation.