Random Characters Who Were Whitewashed by Hollywood (32 items)

(#16) Coleman Silk

In The Human Stain, a film which deals intimately with social prejudice, Anthony Hopkins plays a character masquerading as Jewish who turns out to actually be a light-skinned Black man passing for white. It's not hard to understand why the filmmakers wanted to cast a big name for this role, but many critics agreed that Hopkins' high-profile reputation made the racial dimension of the casting even more awkward and difficult to get behind.
(#29) The Entire Cast of 21 (2008)

This movie was inspired by a true story about a group of MIT students who learned how to count cards and made a fortune in Vegas. Early in the casting process, however, it was indicated by studio higher-ups that "most" of the actors should be white, with "perhaps an Asian female." In real life, almost all of the students who inspired this movie were Asian men.

Most notably, the lead character, Ben, is played by a white actor named Jim Sturgess, although the final cast did end up including a couple of Asian characters as well (possibly in response to preemptive criticism).
(#19) Hae-Joo Chang

Cloud Atlas is a movie based on themes about reincarnation, so we can understand where the decision must have come from to just cast a white actor and put some prosthetics on his face in later scenes to make him appear Asian. Jim Sturgess, who also stood in for Asian MIT students in the movie 21, appears in Cloud Atlas as Hai-Joo Chang, a Korean man.
(#17) Tonto

Johnny Depp was already pushing it when he let Disney put his hair in dreadlocks for Pirates of the Carribean, but his role in 2013's Lone Ranger movie was just too much. In the 1950s TV series, Tonto was played by a Mohawk named Jay Silverheels. "We've got Johnny Depp with a taxidermied crow on top of his head and painted to the nth degree with paint, and he looks like a gothic freak," said Hanay Geiogamah, a Kiowa tribe member and UCLA professor. Not only did they cast Depp, a white man, to play Tonto, but his bizarre mannerisms, face paint, and costume made things even more weird and uncomfortable. To give credit where credit is due, the film did make an attempt to morally condemn the Native American genocide and to incorporate themes about racism and cultural elitism into the plot.
(#26) Maria

Inspired by Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story is a musical about racism in America. In it, American teenager Tony falls in love with Maria, a Puerto Rican immigrant, but their love is ultimately thwarted by gang hostilities, along ethnically divided lines. Given the movie's overtones about the tragedy and pointlessness of racially-motivated violence, it's especially ironic that a white actress, Natalie Wood, was cast as Maria.

Many of the Puerto Rican American supporting characters are indeed played by people of color (including Rita Moreno, whose performance as Anita is one of the film's most haunting), but it's unfortunate that a production about racial prejudice couldn't see its way to casting a Latina actress in its starring role.
(#25) Kwai Chang Caine

Most of these examples are from films, but believe it or not, there was actually an entire television series in the 1970s in which a white dude plays an Asian character. Technically, the character was played by two different white guys - primarily by David Carradine, but occasionally, in flashbacks, by the teenaged Keith Carradine.
The Carradines combined to portray Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin Monk attempting to navigate the American West. The show was very popular, and we're generally big fans of David Carradine, but it's still disappointing that the studio chose not to cast an Asian man for such a visible project about a popular Asian fight style. Even more heartbreaking, according to Herbie Pilato's The Kung Fu Book of Caine, the person originally considered for Carradine's role was, in fact, Hong Kong martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Lee's wife would later claim in her own autobiography that Bruce Lee had actually come up with a similar concept for a television show himself, but had it stolen out from him by Warner Brothers.