The Big Picture

• Ridley Scott's 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings faced criticism for its whitewashed casting choices.
• The film's all-white cast, which used bronzer and brownface, perpetuated racial stereotypes.
• Scott defended the casting decisions, but the argument that big-name actors were necessary for financing doesn't hold up, and Hollywood continues to whitewash roles.

Ridley Scott's 2014 biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings was a highly forgettable movie — or at least, it should have been. A generic, costume- and effects-heavy period piece populated by one-note characters and plagued by weak storytelling, it barely made its combined budget and marketing costs back at the box office and should have slipped quietly into the annals of film history, perhaps filling in an empty weekday evening time slot on basic cable but otherwise never spoken of again. That's probably what would have happened, had Scott not elected to fill out his cast of Hebrew and Egyptian characters with the whitest actors Hollywood had to offer — and then doubled down when the inevitable criticisms of whitewashing began flooding in.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

The defiant leader Moses rises up against Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, setting six hundred thousand slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt and its terrifying cycle of deadly plagues.

What Is 'Exodus: Gods and Kings' About?

The film follows the Bible's Moses (Christian Bale) from his time living as a member of the Egyptian royal family to leading the Hebrews in their exodus from Egypt, including the ten plagues sent by God, the parting of the Red Sea, and the receiving of the Ten Commandments. It's more or less faithful to its source material, with the addition of the requisite interpersonal drama needed to fill out a screenplay. It takes place entirely in Egypt, with all of the characters being Hebrew, Egyptian, or of other African origin.

Yet the names that appeared in top billing and on the promotional materials — white American, British, and Australian actors including Christian Bale as Moses; Joel Edgerton as Ramses II; Aaron Paul as a Hebrew slave; and John Turturro, Ben Mendelsohn, and Sigourney Weaver as Egyptian royalty — don't exactly look like a group of people one might expect to play a cast of entirely Middle Eastern and African characters.

'Exodus: Gods and Kings' Sparked Widespread Criticism for Whitewashed Casting

The backlash to these casting choices was immediate. In early August 2014, four months before the film was released, a Medium article by David Dennis, Jr. went semi-viral; in it, Dennis points out the racism inherent in casting extremely white actors in all the lead roles while filling out the roles of thieves, servants, and peasants with Black actors — what Dennis called "cinematic colonialism." A social media campaign using the hashtag #boycottexodusmovie followed, calling for audiences to stay away from Scott's film and instead spend their time and money on movies like Selma, which follows Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) during the peak of the Civil Rights movement.

The Exodus filmmakers seem to know that the hiring of white actors was problematic: the makeup job done on Edgerton is almost like a tacit acknowledgment that the casting of the blue-eyed Australian as an Egyptian pharaoh was nonsensical. With heavy eyeliner and copious amounts of bronzer applied to darken the actor's natural complexion by several shades, the look borders on brownface. Sigourney Weaver, on the other hand, is as pale as ever, and the black-beaded wig and traditional Egyptian garb she sports as Queen Tuya looks more like an ill-advised Halloween costume than the wardrobe for a $140 million period epic.

Ridley Scott Didn't Respond Well to the Whitewashing Accusations

Ridley Scott, for his part, refused to apologize for his casting choices, instead insisting that they were a necessity in a big-budget undertaking. In an interview with Variety, he infamously insisted that “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.” To those calling for a boycott of the movie, he dismissively remarked, "Get a life."

Variety writer Scott Foundas seems to come to Scott's defense, arguing that the same criticisms could be leveled against many major movies based on Bible stories, including The Passion of the Christ, Noah, and The Ten Commandments. What Foundas fails to mention is that those movies were criticized for their whitewashed casts. Dozens of think pieces were written about the casting of the blue-eyed Jim Caviezel as Jesus and the complete lack of people of color in Noah. The all-white cast, including white actors in actual brownface, of The Ten Commandments was accepted as normal at the time of the film's release in 1956, but in the years since then, as Hollywood has slowly, grudgingly diversified, critics have pointed to the film as representative of the very root of the problem of whitewashed casting that persists to this day.

Ridley Scott's Defense of 'Exodus: Gods and Kings' Casting Doesn't Hold Up

Even disregarding the casual racism of the "Mohammad so-and-so" remark, Scott's argument doesn't hold water. As Forbes writer Scott Mendelson points out, at the time of the film's release, Christian Bale was the only real big-name draw in the cast. Edgerton had done a few major films but wasn't yet a household name. Sigourney Weaver, though unquestionably one of the all-time Hollywood greats, no longer boasted the kind of box office allure that would sell tickets on its own. Similarly, Turturro, Mendelsohn, and Paul are perfectly talented and respectable actors but far from the top of the Hollywood A-list.

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If it was absolutely necessary to cast a huge name like Bale — who was hot off the Dark Knight trilogy and probably at the peak of his fame — in the lead role, fine, but why not fill out the rest of the cast with actors of color? Was it truly necessary to put Sigourney Weaver in that black wig and Joel Edgerton in all that bronzer, or might Scott, with just a bit more effort, have found Black and Middle Eastern actors to play the roles of the rest of the Egyptian and Hebrew people?

Whitewashing Is Still a Problem in Hollywood

Of course, Hollywood learned nothing from the backlash to Exodus: Gods and Kings. Just over a year later, Alex Proyas' Gods of Egypt was released, which also barely made its money back and starred a whole passel of white people as Egyptian gods, including Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Gerard Butler, and, amazingly, Geoffrey Rush as the sun god Ra, a casting choice that sounds straight out of a Simpsons parody. The following year, Scarlett Johansson received criticism for playing the lead role in Ghost in the Shell, an action film based on a Japanese manga in which the main character was originally named Motoko Kusanagi. Around the same time, the MCU debuted Tilda Swinton as Doctor Strange's The Ancient One (a decision that Kevin Feige admits was a mistake), and, equally inexplicably, Rooney Mara appeared as Tiger Lily in the box office bomb Pan. The list goes on and on.

Filmmakers have a truckload of excuses for these casting choices, but the most common one by far is the one used by Scott himself: they have to cast a big name to get financing and sell tickets. What they apparently overlook is that 1) actors of color will never become big names if they're not given the opportunity to play these kinds of roles, and 2) successful movies are made with no-name actors all the time. In fact, Ridley Scott himself was arguably the biggest name attached to Exodus aside from Bale — and if directors with that type of sway won't stick their necks out to promote actors of color into leading roles in big-budget films, then Hollywood will forever be stuck in the twentieth century when it comes to diversity of representation on screen.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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