Casting Director Of ‘Theantanitcher’ Says Yennefer’s Casting Was To ‘Challenge Beauty Standards’ Which Is Completely Insane

Casting has become much more diverse—and much more controversial-when it comes to the big tentpole fantasy series these days. At the heart of these controversial choices are the cast directors.

Sophie Holland is the cast director for a number of major TV series including Wednesday, Shadow and bone and The magician On Netflix, as well as Peripheral It Is On Amazon Prime Video.

In a recent interview with Variety, Holland revealed that her cast choices are, in many ways, a form of social justice activism. She said in an interview that during her The Murder Team, she realized “that casting was not just about finding beautiful people who could do the American accent convincingly, but that casting could have a real, profound impact on the people who watched it.”

In Holland’s mind, she can help girls and women by making specific cast choices. She couldn’t necessarily help people in real life, “but what I could do is change the way people see women through the cast. I can make them powerful and empowering and then the gates will open for them.”

Talking about The magician and the casting of Anya Chalotra as Yennefer, Holland said:

I am always the first to advocate diversity in all its glory. One that comes to mind was the character of Yennefer in The magician. Lauren Schmidt Hissrich is shoporprunner and we work so well together and she is so open to conversations.

In the book, she is described as the most beautiful woman in the world. This was a few years ago and I would like to think that things have changed. But when you think about people’s unconscious bias – especially in the fantasy world, it felt like these worlds were mostly white. And I remember saying, ‘ I feel like we have to challenge what people think of as the standard of beauty. And having a woman of color in this role does incredibly powerful things for people watching.’

Now, This Is Not Holland saying that Chalotra is ugly, or that they cast someone ugly to play the role of the most beautiful woman in the world. (There were other cast choices for The Magicians on the Netflix show that I find deeply controversial and flagrantly unfaithful to the source material, which Holland’s feelings help explain). Instead, Holland is saying that she is challenging the “standard of beauty” by casting a woman with slightly darker skin.

I understand that traditional Western fantasy is predominantly white, but I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the “standard of beauty” for most people is being white. I don’t think anyone in the whole world outside of a tiny, tiny piece of absolute racist slurs would look at Anya Chalotra and think anything other than “this woman is wonderful.”Casting Chalotra can challenge our perceptions of fantasy as White (a complicated discussion on its own) but it does nothing to challenge any standard of beauty.

It’s okay! I don’t think we should challenge beauty standards in a fantasy play about a woman who is grotesquely disfigured and uses magic to become the most beautiful woman in the world. We have to rely 100% on standard notions of beauty for such a character, and Anya Chalotra is the perfect cast choice precisely because she is so stunningly beautiful (and because she is a great actress, of course).

If anything, the star of the show (at least until the third season) is Henry Cavill, and he is very, very handsome to play Geralt of Rivia, who is canonically not very pretty at all. Don’t get me wrong, I think Cavill is perfect in the role and it’s good to make your leadership more attractive than his book (or real-life) counterpart (see, for example, Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery in Love And Death).

In any case, everything is a little silly to me. If you want to make the world a better place, go work in a soup kitchen. Give clothes to the homeless. Get your hands dirty. Cast directors must choose the best people for the job—who can act, who looks the part, who helps enrich the story and the world. The last thing any of these fantasy shows need is activists pushing their political agendas.

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