Robert here! It's a day that ends in a Y which means it's time for another Hollywood whitewashing scandal. This time around we've got the announcement that famously white actor Zach McGowan, of "Shameless" and "Black Sails" fame, will be playing the part of real-life native Hawaiian decorated World War II hero Benehakaka "Ben" Kanahele in an upcoming film called Ni’ihau. Below are pictures of McGowan and Kanahele for comparison.
This latest controversy feels even more egregious than other recent foibles, such as Ghost In the Shell's "it's a Japanese woman's brain put into a white woman's body" or Doctor Strange's "we changed it from Tibetan to Celtic just 'cause." It doesn't take a keen eye to see that McGowan is not even close to right for this role, and furthermore, he's not even a bankable movie star. That, of course, is all beside the point as we've seen time and time again that the ol' "we have to put a white person in the movie or else it won't be profitable" line is not true. Also if they really felt that they needed bankable star power for this movie there are two incredibly popular actors of Native Hawaiian/Pacific-Islander decent working today: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Jason Momoa. There is simply no excuse or reason to cast McGowan in this role.
The nature of the film and the way it's being handled has also caused a lot of concern with the Japanese American community.
Kanahele's story revolves around a Japanese kamikaze pilot who crash lands on the Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Kanahele's family initially took the pilot in, but when the pilot revealed his true intentions and tried to rally the Japanese citizens of the island in an attempted coup, Kanahele and his wife, Ella, killed him. Ben Kanahele declared a hero by no-less than President Roosevelt. Ni'ihau was the inciting incident that lead led Roosevelt to issue his executive order that Japanese-Americans would be put in internment camps. It is obviously a difficult and painful subject to cover, and given how careless the production has been already, there is not a lot of faith that they will handle the complexities well.
Kanahele's story is certainly one that is worthy of the film treatment, but I can't imagine that anyone other than the producers of this movie would think this is the proper way to tell his story.