The BBC has attracted some fresh, topical race related controversy of late with its series Troy: Fall of a City in which Achilles is played by Ghanaian-British actor David Gyasi.
Behold
The question ringing around the internet fora and daily mail comment pages, youtube videos and more is of course whether it is really okay to have a black man play Achilles. The arguments against it are similar to other cases of "whitewashing" as the racial background of the actor doesn't match the character or the context.
I don't really have a problem with it, myself, on the grounds that Achilles and the Myrmidons (all many of whom are portrayed by black actors in this adaptation) are strictly mythical characters. This isn't like the BBC's casting of Nigerian-Jewish Sophie Okonedo as the pointedly un-Nigerian and un-Jewish Margaret of Anjou in their Shakespearean Wars of the Roses drama The Hollow Crown which really did piss me off. That was some bullshit. Margaret was a real person with a big stake in the history of England and several other western European countries. Casting her as a black/jewish woman is both race-baity and egregiously inaccurate alongside the casting of John Wayne as Genghis goddamn Khan. Blachilles and the Melanyrmidons however are depictions of legendary characters which depart from the descriptions in the original text given not for the sake of an accurate account (The Iliad is not at all about history, and is centuries removed from the probable date of the events it depicts anyway) but for thematic and dramatic purposes. Casting the Myrmidons with black actors distinguishes them from the Achaeans (something which is missed by a lot of adaptations) and from the Trojans. Of course they are nothing like the real population of Thessaly in the second millennium BC, but the Homeric Myrmidons aren't really meant to portray those people. It's like casting all the Nephilim of Jötunnar with black men. It still comes across as a bit race-baity and cynical, but I can't piss blood over it.