Gone are the days where brown skinned actors are typecasted to play the thick accented T-Mobile kid. These days, if you are brown, Hollywood is looking for you to play the role of a terrorist. United 93, the movie about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11, hits the big screens today and The LA Times did a great article on the men that play the terrorists.

As filmmakers tell a number of stories about Sept. 11 and other attacks both real and fictionalized — a rapidly growing list that includes “Munich,” “Syriana,” “Paradise Now” and Friday’s “United 93” — there’s increased demand for young Middle Eastern actors. But directors and their casting agents must convince those actors that their cinematic cause is more noble than that of directors a generation ago, who routinely depicted Arabs as cartoonish, fanatical madmen.

Mazhar Munir from Syriana

When writer-director Stephen Gaghan was casting “Syriana,” his ensemble drama about the political and personal costs of America’s dependence on foreign oil, he struggled to find a young actor of Pakistani descent to play a suicide bomber… “I had found a couple of terrific young actors who simply weren’t allowed by their families to take the part,” Gaghan said. “One young man’s family said he would be cut out of the family” if he accepted the role. He held casting sessions in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Damascus, Bahrain, Dubai and Karachi without success before he finally found Mazhar Munir in London.[link]

I haven’t watched ‘Syriana’ yet, and personally, have absolutely no desire to watch ‘United 93’- just watching the trailer makes me queasy. I can only imagine the conflict that these actors feel, especially when it comes to starring in a film about the events around 9/11, a day that impacted so many people in so many ways around the world.

[T]he actors say they are thankful to be rid of the clichéd Middle Eastern villains of the late 1980s and early 1990s (in films such as “Delta Force,” “Navy Seals,” “Iron Eagle”), who were far more likely to be bearded, wear kaffiyehs and shout Arabic insults than resemble a real person. It was precisely those clichéd depictions that made Abdalla so nervous about trying out for “United 93.”

“The reputation of representing Arabs by Hollywood is a stereotype, and it’s an incredibly hurtful stereotype,” says Abdalla, who was born in Scotland to Egyptian parents… “The idea was to put all of those people on the plane and try as best as we can to tell that story,” Abdalla said of his meeting with the filmmaker. “[United 93] wasn’t to be a film about stereotypes.”

#1 Mutineer Crush

[link]

Though playing a terrorist these days tremors actors with trepidation, the role of playing an Iraqi terrorist ex-Republican Guard soldier Lost on an island was one that Naveen Andrews picked. It has served him well as it has now landed him as one of the World’s Most Beautiful People in 2006.

“I feel a sense of responsibility to the Iraqi community and to the Arab world,” Andrews told us…. “I was concerned that the way Sayid was going to be perceived would not be negative or peripheral in any way. The audience is reaching out to the so-called enemy in a way that the government and the media won’t allow them to do.”[link]

If I thought airport security was too constraining for me, I can’t imagine what it must be like for these actors when they go through security. “I’m sorry, officer. But I’m really not a terrorist, I just play one on T.V.”

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