American Gods and race
I’m reading the expanded edition (“Author’s Preferred Text”) and remembering why I love Gaiman’s style so much. I’ve read that he’s working with HBO to make a miniseries out of it, which is exciting, but of course I’m concerned about some serious racefail that could occur in the casting process. I googled “american gods shadow” just to see what peoples’ impressions of the main character are, and I was amazed to see how many deviantart sketches and list of actors on fansites missed the whole part where Shadow is described as being “coffee and cream”-complected, definitely mixed (his mom died of sickle cell and is described as dark— not much more should need to be said on that— and his dad is…well, read the book), and somewhat ambiguous on just what that mix is… but most definitely not white. And yet, here’s this pale (in two cases, blond!) guy showing up in the search results.
Fortunately Gaiman has clout and money and can pull out if they try to change things too much, and he has made it clear from the start that Shadow always seemed a sort of Vin Diesel type of guy to him. I hope he holds his ground if the producers try to make the series “more marketable”.
Oh, and in the most unimaginative move possible, every single casting list I saw made Morgan Freeman as Mr. Nancy.
