Hank Azaria’s Apu apology is bad news for actors who ‘give good foreign’
Because it was so funny the Simpsons for years got a free pass when it came to its questionable treatment of race. That era is assuredly at an end. Hank Azaria this week was offering a mea culpa once again for his voice work as “Indian” Kwik-E-Mart proprietor Apu. “Part of me feels like I need to go around to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologise,” Azaria said on Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert podcast.
This reckoning has been rumbling on for a while. In his 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu spoke of the hurt the character had caused. Azaria he said, “was a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father”. Other Americans of Indian heritage have recounted being called “Apu” in the playground. Azaria didn’t create Apu but has acknowledged his part in the damage done.
The question now is whether he will feel the need to apologise for other equally "problematic" roles. In the 1998 superhero satire Mystery Men, Azaria, a New Yorker with Sephardic Jewish roots, played “the Blue Raja” – a crimefighter “dressed as an Indian man during the British era of occupation”. (It seems safe to say Marvel won’t be adding the Blue Raja to its cinematic universe any time soon.)
In Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage, meanwhile, Azaria was a “stereotypically” gay Guatamalen housekeeper named Agador Spartacus. And in the second Night At the Museum film he chewed the upholstery as “villainous pharaoh” Kahmunrah (to demonstrate his reach he also voiced Abraham Lincoln in that film).
Apu is different, of course, in that many of us grew up with the character. Regrettably, when some people think of Indian-Americans the image that flashes into their head is of Apu singing “Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart?”. Nobody today gives Agador Spartacus from The Birdcage a second thought.
It is unthinkable that Azaria would try on these stereotypes for size today. His big non-Simpsons role recently was as the lead in comedy Brockmire, in which he is a white baseball announcer from Kansas who has a disastrous meltdown on air. There are no wonky accents and the closest Azaria comes to causing offence is wearing a brightly chequered jacket.
Indeed he may soon come to be regarded as one of the last of a dwindling class of actors whose careers were built on playing what Hollywood used to call “ethnic” characters. Mexican-Irish Anthony Quinn, for example, played Greeks, Portuguese, Arabs, Ukranians, Jews, Englishmen, Italians, Latinos, and many more.
More recently there's Cliff Curtis, a Maori from New Zealand’s North Island who portrayed an African American drug dealer opposite Nicholas Cage in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead, an Iraqi in Three Kings, a Latino gangster in Training Day, a Colombian drug dealer in Blow (Pablo Escobar no less) and a Latino FBI director in Live Free Or Die Hard.
“I take the responsibility of playing another ethnicity very, very seriously,” Curtis, who is excellent in all these roles, told Slate. “And I promise myself and those people that I will represent them with as much dignity and integrity as I can muster. I’m not fooling around. I don’t want to make a fool of that cultural heritage. I represent them as I would represent my own.”
That was in 2014. Tellingly he hasn’t been nearly as busy since. In Fear The Walking Dead he was Travis Manawa, an English teacher of Maori descent. And in Fast and the Furious Hobbs and Shaw he was the Samoan half-brother of Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs. His Latin American drug lords phase appears to be in the past.
The degree to which times have changed is illustrated by a 2004 interview with Alfred Molina, born in Paddington to a Spanish father and Italian mother. “I’ve given a few good Jews. I've given a few good Arabs, too. Good Jew, good Arab, good European, good South American, I give good Cuban. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh,” he told the Guardian. “Generally speaking I give good foreign. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”
Molina would not say that today. Nor is he any longer cast as those sorts of characters. He’s currently completing post-production in a Spider-Man sequel in which he reprises his performance as the (American) Doctor Otto Octavius. And in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman he’s a white lawyer tortured by his past. Molina’s career, in other words, is as healthy as it has ever been, only now he is not required to breath life into cliched Hollywood ideas of terrorists or drug lords. (Will he one day be asked to apologise for, say, his French accent in Chocolat?)
Whether Azaria attracts similarly meaty roles remains to be seen. When not putting on an accent, he tends to be landed with underwhelming parts – as a meat-headed cameraman in the 1998 Godzilla, for instance, or appearing briefly opposite Al Pacino in Heat (he sputters an unscripted “Jesus” after Pacino goes off on a rant). For better or worse, Apu is his legacy.
For now, the Apu character has been sidelined while the producers of The Simpsons recast him. Meanwhile, the very Scottish Groundskeeper Willie continues to be voiced by an American. We await your apology, Dan Castellaneta.
