Home / Sections / Balitang Artista / Meghan Markle Calls out ‘Racist’ Mike Myers and Hollywood

Meghan Markle Calls out ‘Racist’ Mike Myers and Hollywood

With Meghan Markle facing scrutiny over anything she does in England, the actress has decided to set her sights on angering people in her new home of Hollywood.

Meghan Markle today took aim at Hollywood for promoting ‘Asian stereotypes’ as she criticized Mike Myers’ Austin Powers and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill for ‘caricaturing’ Asian women ‘as over sexualised or aggressive’ in her first Archetypes podcast after a four-week break following the Queen’s death.

In a new episode exploring the ‘Dragon Lady’ stereotype with journalist Lisa Ling and comedian Margaret Cho, the Duchess of Sussex – a former actress in the legal drama Suits – called out the two 20-year-old movies ‘presenting caricatures of women of Asian descent’.

The 2002 Austin Powers film Goldmember features Japanese women Fook Mi, portrayed by Diane Mizota, and Fook Yu, played by Carrie Ann Inaba. The characters have been criticized for ‘sexually tokenising’ Asian women, and at one stage Powers – a comedy spy who is portrayed as continually on the hunt for sexual conquests – is seen with a list reading ‘threesome with Japanese twins’.

Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 cult hit Kill Bill sees Lucy Liu star as the murderously violent Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii. The character was described by writer India Roby as a stereotypical Dragon Lady who ‘uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity’.

Liu responded to the criticism last year in an opinion piece for The Washington Post, in which she argued that calling O-Ren a Dragon Lady doesn’t make sense considering the film ‘features three other female professional killers in addition to Ishii’.

Meghan began today’s podcast by talking about her experience of growing up in Los Angeles which was ‘full of culture that you could see, feel, hear and taste on a daily basis’ and said she had a ‘real love’ of getting to know other cultures.

She said she was not aware of the stigmas faced by women of Asian descent until many years later.

Brief clips from Austin Powers and Kill Bill were played to illustrate Meghan’s point. The Kill Bill character O-Ren Ishii is heard removing the head of Japanese crime boss Tanaka with a a samurai sword, before stating: ‘The price you pay for either bringing up either my Chinese or American heritage as a negative is: I collect your f****** head.’

artista2

About administrator

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

Scroll To Top