Nightmare Alley writer-director Guillermo del Toro has forged a successful Hollywood film career with a conspicuous missing element: Latino actors. His English-language films have featured devils (Hellboy), Kaiju (Pacific Rim), fish men (The Shape of Water and Hellboy), grotesque vampires (Blade II), the Angel of Death (Hellboy II) and ghosts (Crimson Peak), but not a single Latinx lead character or actor.
Del Toro and his Mexican compatriots Alfonso Cuarón (Roma) and Alejandro González Iñárritu have escaped the scrutiny of their casting decisions thus far—Iñárritu won best director for The Revenant at the same time #OscarsSoWhite was trending in 2015—but if a Mexican director isn’t casting Latinos in mainstream Hollywood movies, who will?
The lack of Latino representation on the big screen is one of the film industry’s not-so-secret failings. A 2021 USC Annenberg report found that only 3.5% of 1,300 American movies in 2019 had a Hispanic/Latino lead. Within the same time frame, Hispanic/Latino directors represented just 4.2% of all helmers of the 100 top-grossing films. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ #OscarsSoWhite embarrassments of 2014 and 2015, where all 20 acting nominations went to white actors, also called attention to bias in awards and casting.
This year’s class of Academy Award acting nominees reflected incremental improvement with four nominees of color, including Best Supporting Actress winner Ariana DeBose. Del Toro was nominated in the Best Picture category as a Nightmare Alley producer, and the film was also nominated for achievement in cinematography, production design and costume design. Del Toro has been on the Academy’s radar since 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, yet does not practice multicultural casting in his prestige projects.
The overwhelmingly white cast of Nightmare Alley includes Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, both of whom appear exceedingly pale-skinned in their roles. Mara’s character, a circus performer, could have been played by an actress of any race in the period drama. Toni Collette’s clairvoyant character could also have been of any ethnicity. Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and Black people were Americans back then, too.
Clifton Collins Jr., whose mother’s family hails from Mexico, is the one Latino spotted in Nightmare Alley in brief blink-and-you-missed-it scenes. He had a slightly larger role in del Toro’s Pacific Rim as a military technician, where his dialogue was limited to lines like “That thing’s still alive sir” and “Left arm’s gone cold, sir.”
Del Toro’s The Shape of Water did not have Latinx actors either. It did include a few Latino references: Caterina Valente and Silvio Francesco’s song “Babalu” plays after Sally Hawkins’ mute character sees her beloved fish man creature for the first time, and the camera flashes to a TV appearance of Portuguese singer Carmen Miranda performing “Chica, Chica, Boom, Chic” as the characters plan the escape of the creature. Octavia Spencer was the fantasy picture’s sole actress of color. As Los Angeles Film Critics Association president critic Claudia Puig pointed out in a recent email exchange, del Toro cast a British actress in the lead role even though the character had an ethnic name, Elisa Esposito.
After his 2018 Best Director Oscar win for The Shape of Water, del Toro told Variety that “success is the moment we are color-blind … when an actor is cast not because it was written specifically but because he or she is right for the part.” There’s little argument with this sentiment in theory, but the Hollywood of 2022 has not reached this ideal state. “Color-blind casting” tends to still default to white actors.
“I think that’s just more than unconscious bias that’s happening in the industry,” said Lauren Sowa, whose “Breaking Stereotypes or Stereotypical Breakdowns?: Analyzing Television Casting Breakdowns for Latina Characters” examines inequities in the casting breakdown process. A breakdown “articulates how an actor should look and act for any given role” and is highly secretive, available only to certified agents and managers. Sowa says, “When there are that many breakdowns that don’t specify race, I think that there is an assumed notion that if it doesn’t say a person of color, it’s assumed white and that’s part of what the problem is.”
Does del Toro forgo featuring Latinos in his movies to, as Diego Luna remarked in 2019, “play the industry’s game?” If the film industry’s default casting is white, del Toro seems to have succumbed to that practice. He’s created memorable fantasy and genre pictures without including Latinos in even make-believe tales.
Del Toro has a stronger record of advocating for Latinos behind-the-scenes. The $60,000 Jenkins-del Toro Scholarship is awarded to Mexican students pursuing a BA or MA in cinematography at any school outside of Mexico. Del Toro also supports the AniMexico scholarship at France’s Gobelins school for Mexican students pursuing a Master of Arts in Character Animation and Animated Filmmaking.
Latinx actors have also fared better on del Toro’s television projects than his films. Joaquín Cosio of Narcos and Gentified fame, Miguel Gomez, Adriana Barraza, Joaquín Cosio, and Mia Maestro are featured on The Strain, a FX horror series co-created and produced by del Toro. Latinx actress Lexi Medrano voices main character Claire Nuñez on the del Toro-produced animated series Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia and Stephanie Beatriz lends her voice to del Toro’s animated Netflix series Wizards: Tales of Arcadia.
It’s time for del Toro to do more to break the cycle of Latino erasure in his English-language movies as he’s done in television. When a walking Tilapia has more screen time than a Latino, there is a problem.
