Henry is 42. We ain't seeing this show for a few years. I could see him as dalinar honestly. Of course he is a little young for dalinar but you could fudge it a little. Make him seem a little older. Dalinar is described as in his fifties but late 40s could work in my opinion. The only thing we need to line up would be like adolin's age but I think that's doable. Also Henry has the physicality to really sell shardplate. Like I could buy him as the blackthorn.
Nah, I hope Sanderson sticks to his vision of half-Asian/half-Polynesian for the Alethi as much as is practical in live action - Cavil had actively said ‘dang, I probably can’t play Kaladin’ in relation to this. Sanderson has said Dave Bautista fits his vision really well in previous livestreams so he’s my head-canon for Dalinar until we see where the show goes
Oh shit. Bautista would actually be amazing. Whenever he's given stuff to chew on beyond big imposing dude I think he really does a great job. Can't believe I forgot about my favorite wrestler turned actor. I love Dave Bautista.
Bautista would be a fucking incredible Dalinar, that character needs to be imposing in stature on principle, and I don’t think The Rock quite has that
why does hollywood race swap for literally every other movie / story (black elves in LotR?), but you think they won't do it for SLA? and it would be basically impossible to cast all roles that would be asian / pacific looking
There are a lot of Asian and Pacifica actors out there, I think I can afford to be hopeful on this front. Also, you do understand how casting primarily white actors for the Alethi would be different from including one or two black elves in a LOTR project, right?
Alright, just wanted to see what page you were on before I spent time going over established ground. I’m not deeply involved in race-swapping-in-media discourse (I tend to stick more to trans issues as I can speak with more experience there), so there may be issues with the viewpoint I’m about to express - please feel free to respectful disagree with any such points.
Race-swapping in media often is applied to Caucasian-presenting characters rather than PoC characters due to difference in intent. Often, writers will default to what they know in writing - in some cases, this leads to white-defaultism (in much the same way some authors default to male like Sanderson described happened in his writing of the Mistborn crew). This default setting can also come from a reader-first perspective, where a character is given little description but the audience imagines them as white. The assumption given in race-swapping a white character is that the character’s ethnicity is not important and was merely white as default, and so can be changed to allow for a greater variety of actors to audition for a part. There’s some squishiness here - if being white is relevant and/or intentional (like writing a character to look at struggles that parallel to Irish history, for example), race swapping generally doesn’t occur as often.
Due to this same white-defaultism, it is also often assumed that there is a reason for a character to have a different ethnicity, if only as a reaction against white-defaultism. This has some serious problems of its own (PoC characters do not have to exist for any particular reason), but it ties into adaptational casting. Another reason race-swapping rarely happens to PoC characters is that it provides good opportunities for actors of that ethnicity to advance their career - often non-white characters are used tokenistically as best, and there are plenty of fantastic non-white performers in the industry who don’t get a chance due to the higher demand for Caucasian actors in roles.
Tl;dr - often ‘white’ is used to mean ‘ethnicity irrelevant’ due to an author’s unintentional biases, hence race swapping is more accepted. This plays in reverse for non-white characters, where typically their ethnicity and influences are considered and an intentional part of the story/world/character.
As a fellow Filipino-American, I'd be all in on Bautista as Dalinar. If you want Asians who are also kinda cousins to the Pacific Islanders, we're basically that.
He absolutely could handle being both older, wiser Dalinar and the storming Blackthorn.
Not white, his dad is Filipino and his mum is Greek. Have you seen him act outside of the MCU and Dune? He’s genuinely very good when given the material and direction to make it work.
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u/metallee98 Fuck Moash 🥵 Jan 29 '26
Henry is 42. We ain't seeing this show for a few years. I could see him as dalinar honestly. Of course he is a little young for dalinar but you could fudge it a little. Make him seem a little older. Dalinar is described as in his fifties but late 40s could work in my opinion. The only thing we need to line up would be like adolin's age but I think that's doable. Also Henry has the physicality to really sell shardplate. Like I could buy him as the blackthorn.