One of the first curious details about Neil Marshall’s Hellboy reboot came when actor Ed Skrein was cast as Ben Daimio.
In the Hellboy comics, Daimio’s always been Japanese-American. Skrein, notably, has always been quite white, and so the question on everyone’s minds at the time was what, exactly, was Lionsgate playing at.
After backlash, and upon learning the character details, Skrein decided to step down from the role and the studio seemingly came to its senses and recast Daniel Dae Kim as Daimio.
But the point still stands that somehow nobody thought of how bad the optics of whitewashing the character would be.
Speaking to Collider, Lloyd Levin, a producer who’s worked on every live-action Hellboy movie to date, said they “lost track” of who the character was in