Gran Torino Actor Reveals Behind-the-Scenes Racism

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The Multicultural Center put on a program that opened the audience’s eyes to the racial stereotypes portrayed in Hollywood films in addition to the unfair treatment that minority actors receive backstage. The program was held on Tuesday, January 18.
Bee Vang, actor and second-year student at Brown University, and Dr. Louisa Schein, Hmong media expert, discussed the truth of what happened behind the scenes of the movie Gran Torino.

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is about a racist old man named Walt who overcomes his prejudice by helping his teenager neighbor Thao. Thao is part of the Hmong community, a small ethnic Asian group.

Though many of the people who have seen the film may have gotten a sense of satisfaction and joy from seeing that Walt overcame his racism, the people who acted as the Hmong members in the movie did not. They were offended by the traces of racism that were included in the movie and that they experienced themselves on set.

Vang, who played Thao in the film, said he and the other Hmong actors were treated unfairly. Eastwood would not allow them to tweak their lines (even though he claimed that he did allow them to when asked in interviews following the release of the movie) and would not give them any tips on character building.

The actors felt degraded when they were told to “make noise” by rambling words in their language. The Hmong actors were also left out by their fellow cast members who were white.

The cast members excluded them from cast events because they immediately assumed that Hmong actors were exactly like their character counterparts—unable to speak English clearly or to understand anything “American.”

Vang also mentioned that he was upset by the way the Hmongs were portrayed in the film. He did not want the Hmong community—his own community—to be seen in a negative light by the audience. He pointed out that tea ceremonies were not performed correctly, that some of their important political lines in the script were not subtitled into English, and that these inaccuracies led to misconceptions of the community.

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