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Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings opens this December, and the casting for the film has been controversial to say the least. Although Ancient Egypt was a racially diverse society, the lead cast — Christian Bale as Moses, Joel Edgerton as Ramses, Sigourney Weaver as Tuya, and Aaron Paul as Joshua — is as white as it gets. That's unfortunately standard for a Hollywood movie, but things took a turn when the above photo hit the Internet. As you might have noticed, the important people are white, the slaves and servants are black. People had a problem with that, especially when they found that black and non-white actors were mostly credited with roles like "Egyptian Thief" and "Egyptian Lower Class Civilian." Yikes. Scott recently spoke to Yahoo Australia, and this is what he said about casting the film.
“Egypt was – as it is now – a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe. We cast major actors from different ethnicities to reflect this diversity of culture, from Iranians to Spaniards to Arabs. There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.”
