After its trailer popped up online yesterday, it took roughly zero seconds for people to start pointing out the unfortunate implications inherent to Hero director Zhang Yimou’s new movie The Great Wall, which sees an ancient Chinese empire drawing upon its greatest natural resource—whitebread mercenary hero Matt Damon—to protect it from some sort of monster attack. Accusations started flying immediately that Yimou and his American partners at Universal were perpetuating the stale old idea that only a grim-looking white dude can save the foreign peoples of the world. “But,” came the inevitable counter-argument, “The movie is Chinese-financed and Chinese-directed, so—” And that’s when Constance Wu stepped in.
You see, the Fresh Off The Boat star—recently the subject of a hashtag campaign that imagined her as the star of several Hollywood blockbusters in the place of a variety of white actresses—has no time for arguments about money when it comes to the film industry’s ongoing wrestling match with representation and race. “Money is the lamest excuse in the history of being human,” Wu wrote today on Twitter. “We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that [only a] white man can save the world.”
Wu’s whole essay—which you can read below—also calls out the idea that only a major movie star can open a movie in America, points out that the film’s Chinese investors are just as susceptible to unconscious pro-white bias as anybody else, and ends on a note demanding that Hollywood better itself. “Can we all at least agree that hero-bias & ‘but it’s really hard to finance’ are no longer excuses for racism?” she writes. “TRY.”