Tuesday, February 5, 2013

To Be or Not To Be - Non-Chinese Actors in Hong Kong


I have been taking advantage of my stay in Hong Kong to catch up with the local media scene. The Hong Kong media scene, especially the TV industry has been dominated by one single channel – TVB. With a dominating rating since its launch 40 years ago, any competitions seemed to be irrelevant. TVB is also the reason why I wanted to become an actor – I was fed with their brilliant productions throughout my childhood.

The company has recently changed hands, not because of financial reason but because of the original owner wanted to go into a real retirement. In the last few years, productions have been criticised at times being lack of originality by copying storylines from western production and other eastern country productions such as Japan and Korea. Nonetheless, with a huge profile of well-known actors, this doesn’t seem to be an issue for this television channel.

I have been coordinating the Diversity Casting Australia group for some time now. During this period, when I discussed the issue with different people, I sometimes got people questioning me about the scene in the Hong Kong media. At that time I informed them that as long as an actor can act and can speak Cantonese, they have similar opportunities to perform on stage and on screen. I remembered when I grew up there were various Indian and western actors who were in TV and film productions. Hong Kong has a huge Indian population and also a quite notable western population, so it was natural to see them on TV and I never questioned their presence. What more is that although they sometimes do play token characters but a lot of times they were just playing your day to day characters like next door neighbours and colleagues at workplace.

This time when turn on the television and watched a recently extremely popular TV series, I noticed that a Kiwi-Australian girl who could speak fluent Cantonese is capturing the hearts of a lot of people. As a daughter of a missionary mother, Corinna Chamberlain is a graduate from the local drama school Academy of Performing Arts in music theatre. Having grown up in Hong Kong, she speaks fluent Cantonese and English. Her rise to attention was not because of her playing some token funny foreign character, but just a normal childhood friend of one of the leading characters. Her supporting role had quickly caught the attention of the audience and the media and her star has been rising quickly.
Hong Kong’s cultural change has been moving forward quickly. Two years ago another Hongkong-Indian actor Gill Mohindepaul Singh also rose to attention because of his regular role as a next- door neighbour in a TVB sitcom.  Similar to Corinna, he speaks fluent Cantonese. He is now working actively in the film industry.

In fact accepting non-Chinese actors in local production is not something entirely new in Hong Kong. One of my childhood friends’ fathers was a TV and film actor before he retired. He was of mixed descent but he looks like a westerner. But he was never short of any opportunities in the industry. When I grew up there are other western actors such as the Australian actor GregoryCharles Rivers, who came to Hong Kong to pursue acting because he was fascinated by the Hong Kong pop music scene. He had a successful run at TVB and now he is a voice coach in Hollywood after being invited by Chow Yun Fat. Another case is Brian Thomas Burrell from America, who is now also working on TV regularly.

One might argue that these are just exceptional cases. But what I wanted to point out is the concept of embracing cultural diversity to reflect our society.  As “mono-cultural” as Hong Kong, as some Australian peers noted, the Hong Kong screen embraces cultural diversity on screen as a norm. Nobody questioned why certain westerner or Indian actor is on screen doing certain role. It was just accepted as it is. Unlike my experience in the past when I discussed the issue with some people, I was informed that I needed to “justify” my presence as a character in an Australian production. Non-Chinese actors can be just anyone apart from their token roles and that was reflected in local productions. People talked about how good Corinna Chamberlain was in her current role but nobody talked about why does the main character have a westerner childhood friend.  I think that is the main difference.

Australia is slowing changing for sure, but is the pace itself too slow compared to other countries? That is my question.


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