Patrick Stewart Is Where We’re Drawing the Line? Star Trek and Casting

Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking with Patrick Stewart when he landed on a very specific complaint about Jean-Luc Picard: the character is French, Patrick Stewart is English, and Picard sounds unmistakably British. Tyson's punchline was that today we might call that cultural appropriation.

Source note: This exchange comes from the StarTalk episode “StarTalk Live at NYCC 2019 with Neil deGrasse Tyson,” released October 11, 2019, during the “Faster-Than-Light Travel” segment.

Which raises an important question.

Patrick Stewart is where we're drawing the line?

Because if an English actor playing a Frenchman is the problem, science fiction has some paperwork to do.

If Picard Is Guilty, Scotty Is Coming With Him

Patrick Stewart, born in England, plays Jean-Luc Picard, born in France, while speaking with Patrick Stewart's very English voice.

Right next to him in Trek history sits James Doohan, a Canadian actor playing Montgomery Scott, a Scotsman whose accent became one of the most recognizable Scottish voices in television.

Those two belong in roughly the same category. An actor from one country plays a character from another country. That is normally called acting.

Walter Koenig was American and played the extremely Russian Pavel Chekov. George Takei was Japanese-American and played Hikaru Sulu, a character Gene Roddenberry conceived partly as a broader representative of Asia. Decades later, Korean-American John Cho inherited the role.

If the test is simply "actor and character are not from the same place," Starfleet Human Resources is going to be busy.

Then There Is Khan. And Khan. And, Somehow, Khan Again.

This is where things get more interesting.

Khan Noonien Singh is explicitly South Asian and Sikh-coded. In the development of the original Star Trek episode "Space Seed," the production moved the character toward a Sikh identity after Ricardo Montalbán was cast. Montalbán, of course, was Mexican.

Then Star Trek Into Darkness recast Khan as Benedict Cumberbatch.

So while we are teasing Patrick Stewart for being insufficiently French, one of Star Trek's most famous South Asian characters has been played by Ricardo Montalbán and Benedict Cumberbatch.

And because the universe apparently wanted to hand us the joke gift-wrapped, Hollywood had already given us John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

Yes, one Khan is a title and one is a name. That does not matter for our purposes.

Somewhere in an alternate cut of The Conqueror, somebody looks up at John Wayne, shakes a fist at the sky and screams:

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Asia Is Not One Country, but Acting Is Still Acting

Star Trek's Asian casting history gets much more nuanced, because some of the actors involved have directly rejected the idea that every Asian character must be played by an actor of the exact same national ancestry.

Linda Park is Korean-American and played Hoshi Sato, who is Japanese. Garrett Wang is Chinese-American and played Harry Kim, who is Korean. George Takei, a Japanese-American actor, originated Sulu, and Korean-American John Cho later played him.

When StarTrek.com asked Park about this kind of cross-national casting, she pushed back hard on the premise. Her argument was essentially that a Korean actor playing Japanese is more like a British actor playing Irish than a white actor playing Uhura. She also pointed out the practical problem: Asian actors already compete for a relatively limited pool of roles, and narrowing those roles further by exact ancestry can reduce opportunities instead of expanding them.

Rosalind Chao makes the same issue even harder to flatten into a slogan.

Chao is Chinese-American. On Star Trek, she played Keiko O'Brien, who is Japanese. In M*A*S*H, she played Soon-Lee, a Korean refugee who becomes Klinger's wife.

When Vanity Fair asked Chao about that history, she said the Star Trek producers had actually offered to change Keiko from Japanese to Chinese. Chao told them not to. Her position was that ethnicity and race are not the same casting question, and that actors should be allowed to act across nearby national identities.

That matters. It is easy, decades later, to look at a Korean actor playing Japanese or a Chinese actor playing Korean and declare that somebody has been wronged. It is more complicated when the performers themselves say, "No, this is part of the job."

And Then There Is M*A*S*H

This is where one of my other favorite television shows enters the conversation.

M*A*S*H was remarkably willing to confront racism for a network sitcom of its era. It dealt directly with racist American soldiers, segregation-era attitudes, interracial relationships, Korean civilians, refugees, displaced children, war brides, and the casual dehumanization of Asians during wartime.

In "Dear Dad... Three," a wounded white soldier worries about receiving blood from a Black donor, and the episode makes his racism the target. In "The Tooth Shall Set You Free," Hawkeye and B.J. uncover an officer deliberately putting Black soldiers in greater danger. The show repeatedly treated prejudice as something ugly, foolish, and incompatible with the humanism at the center of the series.

And then the casting department would apparently look at the map of Asia and say, "Close enough."

Japanese-born Mako appeared multiple times on M*A*S*H, playing a Chinese doctor, a South Korean doctor, a South Korean officer, and a North Korean soldier.

Japanese-American actor Clyde Kusatsu played Korean bartender Kwang Duk, Chinese-American soldier Michael Yee, and Japanese-American surgeon Paul Yamato.

Rosalind Chao, again, is Chinese-American and played Korean Soon-Lee.

This does not mean M*A*S*H did not care about race. Quite the opposite. The contradiction is interesting precisely because it cared so much.

The show could spend an episode insisting that Korean civilians were individual human beings caught in somebody else's war, then turn around and cast Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian identities through a comparatively small repertory of Asian-American actors.

That was partly the industry it existed inside. It was also a blind spot.

Star Trek Had Its Own Earth-Bound Trouble Spots

The same tension appears in Star Trek.

Chakotay was written as Native American, but the character's cultural identity was deliberately broad and often blended imagery and traditions rather than grounding him consistently in one specific people. Robert Beltran, who played him, is Mexican-American.

And then there is the original-series episode "The Paradise Syndrome," where Spock identifies a transplanted Earth population as a mixture of Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware people, while the episode presents a generalized television version of Native American culture.

That is more substantive territory than Patrick Stewart sounding British while playing a Frenchman.

Meanwhile, the Klingons Have Changed Species Four Times

Alien races do not count for our Earth-ethnicity rule, but there is no way to have this conversation without taking a brief detour through Klingon Foreheadgate.

Original-series Klingons mostly looked human, with makeup, facial hair, and costuming doing the work.

Then Star Trek: The Motion Picture gave them cranial ridges.

The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine refined those ridges into the Klingon look most viewers now think of as standard.

Then Discovery redesigned them again so aggressively that, viewed side by side, you could be forgiven for thinking somebody had replaced the species between seasons.

Deep Space Nine finally turned the inconsistency into a joke in "Trials and Tribble-ations." The crew sees the smooth-headed Klingons from Kirk's era and stares at Worf.

O'Brien suggests genetic engineering. Bashir suggests a viral mutation.

Worf's answer:

"We do not discuss it with outsiders."

Years later, Enterprise actually built an in-universe genetic and viral explanation around the old makeup discrepancy, which means Bashir and O'Brien were suspiciously close.

Marina Sirtis Invented an Accent and Apparently Nobody Told Betazed

There is also a wonderfully sideways version of the same identity problem in Deanna Troi's accent.

Marina Sirtis was asked to give Troi an accent that sounded alien. She developed one partly from an Israeli friend's speech and treated it as a Betazoid accent.

Then Majel Barrett arrived as Deanna's fully Betazoid mother, Lwaxana, speaking with an American accent.

Sirtis asked why.

The explanation became that Deanna got the accent from her human father.

Eventually the show introduced her father.

He did not talk like that either.

Sirtis went back and asked again. The explanation reportedly evolved into: they sent Deanna away to school.

Other Betazoids continued appearing without Deanna's accent.

So either Deanna attended an extremely specific boarding school, or Marina Sirtis accidentally invented a regional dialect spoken by exactly one woman in the Federation.

Meanwhile, the Alien Produce Section Is Apparently at Stater Bros.

There is one more Star Trek production trick that deserves a salute, because once you notice it you can never stop noticing it: apparently the fastest route to another planet is through the exotic-fruit section of an Earth grocery store.

That yellow-orange thing covered in little horns? That's a kiwano, also called a horned melon or African horned cucumber. It ripens to a golden yellow-orange with darker orange mottling and has bright green, jelly-like flesh inside. In other words, it looks like somebody in the Delta Quadrant designed a cucumber after watching too much science fiction.

And yes, Star Trek really did use it that way. In Voyager's "Blink of an Eye," the primitive inhabitants of the time-accelerated planet place a "fire-fruit" on an altar. The very alien-looking fire-fruit is a kiwano melon. Food writers have also noted that Paramount's Star Trek productions used horned melons as futuristic food props.

Which means I can be watching Neelix serve something allegedly harvested three thousand light-years from Earth and think, "Dude, I see that every week at Stater Bros."

And the kiwano is not alone. StarTrek.com has flat-out acknowledged that the props department regularly used "exotic" Earth fruits such as dragon fruit and lychees as alien cuisine. Add enough starfruit, rambutan, jackfruit, unusual melons, brightly colored sauces, and produce that a mainstream American audience did not immediately recognize, and congratulations: dinner is now from Rigel VII.

It is the culinary cousin of the casting issue we have been talking about. Not because using a horned melon is offensive, obviously, but because the production shortcut is the same kind of thing: unfamiliar to the expected American viewer becomes shorthand for foreign, exotic, or literally extraterrestrial.

To be fair, it works. Kiwano really does look like it should come with a warning from Starfleet Medical.

Food-prop sources: StarTrek.com on exotic fruits used as alien cuisine and Vegetarian Journal on Paramount using horned melon as futuristic food.

The Point Is Not That These Shows Were Backward

This is the part that matters.

Star Trek and M*A*S*H were both famously progressive in the way they were willing to deal with race.

Star Trek put Nichelle Nichols' Uhura on the bridge as a competent professional during the civil-rights era, made racial diversity an ordinary feature of its imagined future, and produced one of American television's landmark interracial kisses. Martin Luther King Jr. famously encouraged Nichols to remain on the show because of what her presence meant to Black viewers.

M*A*S*H, a comedy about an American military hospital in Korea, repeatedly made racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, poverty, displacement, and the human cost of war part of its stories. The Smithsonian has described the series as increasingly daring and complex, and "pro-humanity" may be the best description of its moral center.

These were not shows that did not care about race.

They cared about it unusually much.

And they still inherited assumptions, limitations, casting habits, and blind spots from the television industries that made them.

That is more interesting than declaring every mismatch between actor and character to be cultural appropriation.

Sometimes an English actor is simply playing a Frenchman.

Sometimes a Korean-American actress playing a Japanese character says that is exactly what actors should be allowed to do.

Sometimes Hollywood treats an entire continent as interchangeable.

Sometimes a fictional alien species changes forehead geometry every decade and refuses to explain itself to outsiders.

And sometimes John Wayne plays Genghis Khan.

So yes, Neil, we can have the cultural-appropriation conversation.

But Patrick Stewart?

That's the one we're starting with?

Because somewhere, very faintly, in the distance...

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Further Reading

For the casting history behind Khan and Asian representation in Star Trek, see StarTrek.com's pieces on the evolution of "Space Seed", Linda Park's interview, and Sulu and Asian representation. Rosalind Chao discusses Keiko, M*A*S*H, and cross-ethnicity casting in Vanity Fair. The Smithsonian has useful context on both Star Trek's racial history and the cultural legacy of M*A*S*H.