Hollywood Whitewashing: 16 Times White Actors Played Minority Characters

8. Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia

Jake Gyllenhaal was cast as Dastan in the film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Jake not only had the challenge of playing a different ethnicity, but of bringing a video game character to life. “I went online when I first started researching stuff for the role. What was really important was for me personally to bring some sort of realism into this world that is not always fully based on reality. So often you can hide in all that stuff so easily, and to look at what say a real Persian prince would look like and then who the Prince of Persia is in the video game and then a whole slew of inspiration in between there.” Considering he was playing a virtual character, perhaps it wasn’t essential that a real Iranian be cast in this role.