People only just realising Beckham Netflix director did ‘brownface’ in cult 80s movies

People are just realising that the director of David Beckham’s new Netflix docuseries is also the actor who ‘browned up’ in cult 1980s movies.

Fisher Stevens’ breakout role was in the 1986 sci-fi comedy Short Circuit playing the Indian engineer, Ben Jabituya. The role involved him sitting through multiple rounds of makeup to ‘appear Indian’ as well as changing his voice to sound more ethnic.

He went on to reprise the role in the movie’s 1988 sequel and his since had a varied acting career, including in hit series Succession. Now social media users are putting two and two together as they piece together where Beckham’s director got his big break in Hollywood.

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One person wrote: “Didn’t he play that fake Asian guy (in brown face and accent) in Short Circuit 1 and 2?”

Another said: “First major revelation of the Beckham documentary is that it’s directed by the dude from Short Circuit 1 & 2. His character in that was Indian and, he is not.”

In more recent years the actor who describes himself as a “white Jewish kid from Chicago” opened up about the regret he feels for playing an Indian character in brownface.

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Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment Fisher admitted the Short Circuit role “definitely haunts me. I still think it’s a really good movie, but I would never do that part again.”

Fisher had previously made comments addressing his problematic involvement in a 2015 New York Times interview with Aziz Ansari, where the Parks and Recreation star wrote a personal essay detailing his meeting with the actor he had grown up watching on screen – without realising for years that his Indian role model wasn’t actually Indian.

In his essay, Ansari explains that Fisher was told his role was originally a white grad student and was changed by the director and co-writer John Badham to be an Indian character. Asked if he could “play Indian,” Fisher said yes and threw himself into doing the work to play the role as more than a stereotype, which included reading Indian books, studying with a dialect coach, and living in India for a month before shooting the sequel.

“Toward the end of the conversation, it seemed to fully hit him how insensitive his casting may have been, and he said several times that he believed the role should have been played by an Indian and that he would never take it today,” Ansari wrote in the piece.

Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk