Netflix has recently become a producer of content as well as a popular pipeline, with Kevin Spacey’s new political thriller House of Cards. Directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and starring major class acts like Robin Wright and Kate Mara, this is a major undertaking: all thirteen hour-long episodes premiered on Netflix on February 1, and it’s making a fairly big splash (though numbers, obviously, are hard to come by, since Cards is available only on Netflix, a private concern).
The series prominently features a Latina character, Presidential Chief of Staff Linda Vasquez. She is identified at the outset as a Latina–a Cuban, specifically–and “tough as a two-dollar steak.”
Sakina Jaffrey
And she is played by accomplished Indian-American actress and Broadway star Sakina Jaffrey.
Unlike the tempest in a teapot over Ben Affleck playing a “Latino” character in Argo (based on a real-life espionage agent who has since made it clear he does not consider himself a Latino, or part of Latino culture), this is pretty clearcut cast of “brownface:” a fictional character, explicitly Latino, played by an unambiguously non-Latino actress. And though the Argo issue has generated major verbiage on and offline, the House of Cards casting has gone unnoticed.
It’s hard to believe that there are no accomplished Latina actresses “of a certain age”–both Cuban and non-Cuban–who could have taken on this role. In fact, it would take about five minutes to come up with a list, many of them better known (and probably no more expensive) than Ms. Jaffrey. But apparently the question simply didn’t come up. And despite all the publicity that House of Cards has generated because of its unique distribution and the Spacey/Fincher involvement, a quick search of the inter-webs yields…well, basically nothing. Nobody seems to care that a major Latino role has gone to a non-Latino.
Netflix paid $100 million for 26 hour-long episodes of this impressive, intelligent drama. Half of those episodes are already done and available for viewing. The producers even went to the trouble to include a powerful, intelligent Latina character, which is a laudable decision. It’s just a shame that an actual Latino couldn’t be found to fill that role.
And where’s the outcry from Latino Hollywood?
