"Broad City" star Arturo Castro has experienced plenty of typecasting at auditions, and now he's turning the tables to prove how absurd it is for casting directors to ask Latino actors to perpetuate stereotypes.
"One guy asked, like, 'pretend like you jumped over [the fence] like yesterday!' and I was like 'What the...!'" Castro said in a Mic video called, "Flip the Script with Liz Plank" which was posted on Tuesday.
"You know, you spend a long time getting rid of your accent, but the first thing they ask you for, usually, especially when I first started, was an accent," Castro added.
And to highlight the absurdity Latino actors face by being told to act more stereotypical during auditions -- be it by using thicker accents or acting a certain way -- Castro and Plank put together a fake audition where they asked white actors to act "whiter."
But as the video mentions, Hollywood's Latino problem goes beyond auditioning. Latino actors had only 4.9 percent of the roles in the 100 top-grossing films of 2013, according to the University of Southern California -- despite buying 25 percent of movie tickets sold that year and making up 17 percent of the population.
Take a look at how several white actors reacted to being told to do things like, say the word "peruse" as if they were in a country club.
By the end of the video, one actor seemed to get an idea of what was happening and said:
"I know auditions in general are kind of like, you're not acting like a real person, but I don't think that's an excuse to be shitty to somebody -- [to say] like 'oh yeah, lean into a stereotype.'"
Check out the video above and stick around for the big reveal at the end.
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