i mean yes he’s going to be the first to get a solo movie but

In Scotland, it goes:

Primary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

This is know as the Shigir Idol

“A mysterious wooden idol found in a Russian peat bog has been dated to 11,000 years ago - and contains a code no one can decipher. 

The Shigir Idol is twice as old as the Pyramids and Stonehenge - and is by far the oldest wooden structure in the world. Even more mysteriously, it is covered in what experts describe as ‘encrypted code’ - a message from a lost civilisation. Professor Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology said: ‘The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of the Idol.’ Russian experts think that the strange carvings may contain a belief system, the equivalent of the Bible’s Genesis. The statue had been dated as being 9,500 years old, after its discovery in a peat bog 125 years ago. But new research in Mannheim, Germany used Accelerated Mass Spectrometry n small fragments of the sculpture, and found it is at least 11,000 years old. That means the sculpture dates from the very beginning of the Holocene epoch - the era when man rose to dominate the world.’

Let me put this as simply as possible:

If you heard a beautiful melody played on a violin, and you went “I want to do that. I want to make beautiful music on a violin,” you would not be surprised if, the first time you picked up a violin, you found yourself making noises that sounded like a cat was in pain. 

So you’d learn the violin. Learn the strings, the fingering, how to bow. You’d be proud at the point where you could play “Twinkle twinkle little star” on it. If you stopped there and said “I’ll never be good at this…” well, you’d be right. But you’d be right because you stopped, not because it is impossible to play the violin well.

And if you learned violin and got better and practiced, one day you’d be able to play beautiful music on the violin. You might never be a world-class violinist, but you’d be competent.

You are always allowed to decide it’s too hard or frustrating to carry on with anything. But, mostly, you don’t get to be magically good at something, whether that something is art, medicine, law, ballet, cartography or martial arts. The writing fairy, the painting fairy, the composing fairy, will not descend in the night if you decide that’s what you do, touch their glittering wands to your forehead, and allow you to wake in the morning with all the talents, skills, knowledge and experience you need to be really good.

That’s why everyone’s answer is to practice, to do it, to learn. It’s because the short-cuts are mostly blind alleys. It’s because it’s work. It’s because there really are skills to learn, and you should learn them if you want to be good, whatever it is you hope to do.

Charlize Theron on rumors that her and Tom Hardy clashed on set: “We f–kin’ went at it, yeah. And on other days, he and George [Miller, the director] went at it,“ she reveals. “It was the isolation, and the fact that we were stuck in a rig for the entire shoot. We shot a war movie on a moving truck — there’s very little green screen. It was like a family road trip that just never went anywhere. We never got anywhere. We just drove. We drove into nothingness, and that was maddening sometimes.”

Theron and Hardy filmed on location in Swakopmund in Namibia, on the edge of the Namib Desert, for six-and-a-half months. But it wasn’t just the environment that was driving them mad.

“It’s material that’s really frightening — we didn’t have a script. Tom and I are actors who take our jobs seriously. Both of us want to please the directors we work with, and when you don’t know if you can deliver on that, it’s a frightening place to be — and for Tom more than me, because he was stepping into big shoes,” Theron explains.

Despite going at it a few times, Charlize went on to say that she ultimately appreciated Tom’s approach more than some of her peers.

“I’d rather have that honesty working with someone than someone who fake-smiles through something — especially for actors, when your job is to go for the emotional truth. When you’re with somebody and you don’t feel like you’re in their emotional truth, then you don’t trust them,” she says. “I think good actors go all the way. If you want to be a safe actor, and you emotionally protect yourself from things getting out of hand, the performance will show all of that. Anyone who really, really, really goes into the deep dark corners of what emotional truth is, as somebody who works opposite of that, you have to be grateful for that. I beg for that. I beg for that on a job, that potency to the stew that makes it that magic that it is.”

Despite their rocky relationship, Charlize showed the interviewer a gift that Tom left for her in her trailer. It was a self-portrait Hardy painted with a red handprint on the back and an inscription: You are an absolute nightmare, BUT you are also f–king awesome. I’ll kind of miss you. Love, Tommy.

So, say someone makes a show set in Victorian London. There are no characters of color on the show.

Someone watches the show and says, “Hey, why is everyone on this show white?”

The creators of the show, rather than accepting responsibility for 1. choosing the setting of the show in the first place or 2. their own casting choices, say, “Hey! That’s just historically accurate, there WERE no PoC ‘back then’!!” 

Basically, it’s about trying to pass the buck onto “history” for creative choices they made. Like: “OH, I didn’t WANT to exclude anyone, but I HAVE to be loyal and accurate to the true history!”

And everyone just accepts that as if it’s true, and as if that is a good reason to make a show that consists entirely of white people. 

This is about dodging accountability in that they chose a setting they assumed would have only white people in it, and then made that true. And that has happened so many times that the myth just keeps perpetuating itself. Rather than consulting actual history or demographics, they base this idea on TV shows, books and movies that have already recreated some version of “Victorian London” that contains nothing but white citizens (in much the same way the citizens of supposed “New York City” in countless sitcoms are inexplicably white); media from ten years ago, 20 years, 50 years, and so on.

That establishes the context. Now, the facts.

London is one of the most diverse cities on Earth, and it didn’t get that way in the last ten minutes.

Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina (1995)

A glimpse into the lives of the thousands of Africans living in eighteenth century London. 

The UCL Equiano Centre has an Interactive Map with information about various Black Londoners 1800-1900.

Photograph of John Archer, Mayor of Battersea, South London. England, 1913

When he was elected Mayor of Battersea, John replied to press speculation about where he might have come from with the remark that he had been born - “in a little obscure village in England probably never heard of until now - the city of Liverpool”. He went on to declare - “I am a Lancastrian bred and born”.

Characteristically pugnacious, but he had been stung by reports which, guessing wildly, said that he had been born in Rangoon or somewhere in India. He was actually part of the already well-established black population in Liverpool.

[more about Peter Jackson]

Lady Sarah Forbes Bonetta, goddaughter to Queen Victoria herself.

London is and was a vastly multicultural and diverse city. Even before the 1800s and photography, surviving artworks depict a massively diverse populace:

[The Royal Sport, Pit Ticket]

Here’s a link to the British Library’s resources on people of Asian descent living in Britain. The history of the Chinese community in London goes back for centuries. 

You also have:

Sailors of South Asian origin (known as Lascars) based out of London, for the most part:

http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/117212.html

http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/148377.html

http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/552967.html

I could keep going.

But the point I’m making here is that claiming your whitewashed media is somehow “historically accurate” is total bunk.