When the cast of “Crazy Rich Asians,” scheduled for release Aug. 15, was announced in 2017, many celebrated the opportunity to see a major Hollywood film with a cast of Asian descent.

But despite the excitement, there was some backlash centered on the film’s star, Henry Golding, who plays a character of Chinese descent raised in the U.K. Some believed Golding, who is of British, Malaysian, and Singaporean descent, was not right for the lead, and thought the role should have gone to an actor of full Asian descent instead.

Golding has said it was fair for others to question the film’s casting and also defended his upbringing. “I think it’s fair to question motives of why they’re choosing me instead of someone else,” he told The New York Times. “I never felt I wasn’t suitable for the role because I was half-white. I’ve always seen myself as Asian, so I never had any qualms about that.”

While there have been calls for Hollywood to consider an actor’s ethnic background when casting a role (last year, Jackie Chan faced criticism when he was cast as a Vietnamese character in “The Foreigner”; before ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat” premiered in 2015, Randall Park, who is Korean American, addressed his casting as a Taiwanese-American character; and the 2005 Academy Award-nominated film “Memoirs of a Geisha” came under fire for casting Chinese actresses as Japanese), some casting directors say it’s not that easy.

Screen Actors Guild rules and guidelines on discrimination prohibit casting directors from asking actors what their ethnicity is.

“We cast by how they look,” Jennifer Bender, executive director of Central Casting — an entertainment company that hires background actors for films, commercials, and movies — said. “It is based on look rather than actual background.”

The right look

Appearances factored heavily into casting director and former actress Elaine Del Valle’s own career. Appearing in shows like “Dora The Explorer” and “The Sopranos,” Del Valle said one of her frustrations as an actress “was not being seen as Latina enough.”

“When trying to get roles in TV and film I was hitting a wall,” she said. “They were hiring people who didn’t look like me.”

Colorism is a symptom of racism ... It goes hand-in-hand with racism, to the degree that we are addressing racism or adjusting our practices in ways to try to offset the effects of racism, we will likely impact colorism as well.

Del Valle said she still believes the television and film industry is looking for Latina actresses of a certain complexion — the commercial industry is looking for Latinas with a Caucasian look, she contends, and darker-skinned Latinas are the norm on the big screen.

“If they say to me, ‘Hire a Latina,’ I know Latinas that have blonde hair and blue eyes and with terrific Spanish, but that’s not the one that they want to hire or sometimes they do depending on what they’re looking for,” Del Valle said. “They want someone who looks it and looks it to them.”

A similar debate surfaced earlier this year following the release of “Black Panther,” when actor Amandla Stenberg — who uses they-them pronouns — said in an interview that they had walked away from auditioning for the film because “it would have just been off to see me as a bi-racial American with a Nigerian accent just pretending that I'm the same color as everyone else in the movie."