Actor Idris Elba made news when he was cast in the role of Heimdall in the upcoming Marvel Comics movie Thor, but that news wasn’t positive.  Some white supremacists got up in arms over a black man being cast as a Norse god.  In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter the actor blasted the critics and racists who had an issue with the casting.  The actor had this to say:

We have a man [Thor] who has a flying hammer and wears horns on his head. And yet me being an actor of African descent playing a Norse god is unbelievable? I mean, Cleopatra was played by Elizabeth Taylor, and Gandhi was played by Ben Kingsley.

Bleeding Cool gave some other examples of minority roles including Noah Ringer playing Aang in The Last Airbender. Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh were in Memoirs of a Geisha and Reece Shearsmith as Papa Lazarou.  I’ll also throw in C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man and since it’s on tv while I write this, Eddie Murphy in Coming to America.

The majority of the article is focused on roles for black actors and came on the heals of the NAACP Image Awards.