Billy Magnussen has been cast as Prince Anders in Disney’s live-action remake of 1992’s Aladdin (Picture: Disney/REX)

As a Disney-loving woman of Arab descent, the news that Aladdin was going to be given the live-action treatment filled me with joy.

Now that a white male character has been added to the story that feeling has turned to tempered rage.

Dear Guy Ritchie, please don’t whitewash Aladdin by casting Tom Hardy as Jafar

Since the dawn of cinema, movies have catered to a white male audience. Then, as the years went on and the waves of feminism took its effect on society, shifted to include a white female audience too, but still there was little consideration for the people of colour watching.

When Aladdin came out in 1992, it was one of the few animations, or films in general, to completely focus on non-white characters.




For young brown girls like me – I was four at the time – we finally had a Disney princess who looked like us.

We saw ourselves, however fantastically orientalist the storyline, represented on-screen in a positive way that was rarely seen.

‘For young brown girls like me, we finally had a Disney princess who looked like us’ (Picture: Walt Disney Productions)

Nowadays, you will more often see Arab people playing taxi drivers, terrorists or devout Muslim, so when Disney announced they were going to make Aladdin into a live-action movie we celebrated.

Finally we were going to see a mainstream, big-budget movie whose cast would be solely made up of ‘authentic’ cast members, or that’s what the producers said.

Dan Lin told Collider that he and director Guy Ritchie wanted to ‘make a diverse version of the movie.’

‘Luckily for me, [director] Guy Ritchie has the same vision and Disney has the same vision, so we’re not here to make Prince of Persia,’ he said.

‘We want to make a movie that’s authentic to that world.’

Clearly Disney, Ritchie and screenwriter John August had other ideas.

Now Aladdin will include a brand new (not in the original story or animated film) white character called Prince Anders, played by Billy Magnussen, ‘a suitor from Skanland and potential husband for Princess Jasmine.’

The casting of Billy Magnussen has caused controversy (Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

It was insulting enough that after a worldwide search for actors and actresses to play the leads, Disney cast the whitest non-white person to play the Princess.

Naomi Scott may be half-Indian, but Hollywood has a long history of colourism: a form of prejudice which sees actors and, especially, actresses of color with a darker skin tone overlooked and less featured on-screen than those with a lighter skin tone.

So it’s understandable that many fans of colour were disappointed that the opportunity to represent an ethnic aesthetic authentic to the Arab world, that the fictional Agrabah is set in and inspired by, was not used.

To now have a totally made-up white male character thrown into this story is more than insulting, it’s damn offensive.

Maybe the filmmakers don’t think there is enough white-led movies out there.

This Prince Anders has been shoehorned into the script, reducing Princess Jasmine even further as the object of male attention.

Power Rangers star Naomi Scott will play Jasmine (Picture: Mike Pont/FilmMagic)

She already has Aladdin/Prince Ali and Jafar to contend with, as well as an overbearing father, but now she’s got another man to objectify her in the story.



Nice one.

The most frustrating thing about this new white character is that if they wanted to shake up the storyline, they could have made him ethnic and given an actor of colour the opportunity to star in a major motion picture.

The original Aladdin story first appeared in One Thousand And One Nights, a famous collection of Middle Eastern folk tales from the Islamic Golden Age, which had roots in Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Jewish and Egyptian folklore and literature.

Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp, added in 1710 by French translator Antoine Galland, was actually set in China with the sorcerer (AKA Jafar) hailing from Maghreb in North Africa.

Disney chose to set their animated tale in a fictional Middle Eastern city so if they wanted to make the live-action more ‘authentic,’ this new prince could have hailed from China, North Africa or one of the other regions mentioned in the Arabian Nights, not some white guy from Norway who fancied himself an exotic trophy bride.

But why stop there?

If Disney are just making up characters now, they could have instead added a new female one to the cast to even up the gender balance.

Nasim Pedrad’s Mara may have been created for the film but with Prince Aryan, sorry Anders, thrown into the mix, we now have five male and two female stars in the line-up.

Nasim Pedrad has been confirmed to star in the update (Picture: Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage)

If you thought representation for ethnic actors was bad, you won’t believe the struggle for actresses of colour.

There’s a reason why the casting news has been met with such backlash, not just by people of colour but people of all races who can see that this decision was a massive misstep – but Aladdin isn’t alone in its whitewashing.


Death Note, Ghost In The Shell and The Great Wall suffered for their decision to cast white actors in leading roles because these films are steeped in Eastern culture.

Ed Skrein recently dropped out of the Hellboy reboot because he realised what a mistake it was for him, a white actor, to play a Japanese-American character.

The film industry needs to wake up to the fact that ethnic audiences will no longer accept their whitewashing.

Ed Skrein dropped out of the Hellboy remake (Picture: John Lamparski/WireImage)

Aladdin may be filled with overt Middle Eastern stereotypes living in a fake kingdom, but it was our kingdom, and Disney took that away from us.

Representation matters, diversity matters and cinema is one of the most influential platforms in the world to tell the stories of many cultures.

Disney has been pretty good recently in diversifying their film catalogue with films like Moana, Queen of Katwe, and the A Wrinkle In Time remake, but they lose points, massively, for feeling the need to add a white character to better tell this Middle Eastern story.

Aladdin should be setting the precedent for diversity, not obscuring it.

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