City Research Online

Abstract

Film industry elites justify racially exclusionary casting practices with the rationale that White audiences prefer to watch White actors. Nevertheless, previous academic research into White audience demand for minority film casting has produced mixed results in testing this claim. Presenting findings from a mixed-method quantitative (n = 1071) and qualitative (n = 25) study, this article examines the relationship between audience race and ethnicity and actor race and ethnicity versus other potential influences on demand, and investigates how film audiences discursively justify their casting preferences. We find that, overall, awareness and perceived attractiveness of an actor remain more important criteria than race and ethnicity when audiences make consumption choices. Nevertheless, racialized assumptions and issues of systemic racism pervade White audiences’ casting rationales, particularly in the way that Eurocentric beauty standards and expectations about what actors should “look like” inflect audience discourses around perceived fit of an actor to a role.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	film audiences, film industry, actors, race and ethnicity, diversity, Whitewashing, awareness, attractiveness
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Department of Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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