Gedde Watanabe didn't consider his 'Sixteen Candles' Long Duk Dong role racist: 'In that period of time, people still had to be educated about parameters.'
Jessica is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she covers TV, movies, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in Bustle, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, and more. She lives in California with her dog., but actor Gedde Watanabe, who played the foreign exchange student, admitted it didn't occur to him at the time that the character was offensive., said he was just happy to be a working actor at a time when Asians were scarcely represented on screen.
"Frankly I was like, this is a good job, and I'm going to get paid more doing one week in this movie that I did for all the years I was in the theater," he told."It didn't really occur to me that it was a stereotype because there wasn't really anything out there for Asian actors at the time. It was just so scarce. So I didn't think it was stereotypical or racist.
"I remember the movie using the word 'Chinaman,' and even then I was like, 'Oh, that's not great,'" Watanabe continued. "But you also have to remember in that period of time, people still had to be educated about parameters, what the alarm bells were when it came to being offensive."as Samantha, a teen whose 16th birthday was overshadowed by her sister's impending wedding and the angst of her crush on popular boy Jake Ryan .
Watanabe, Japanese American born and raised in Utah, doesn't speak with a heavy accent — and revealed that he once surprised Hughes by speaking in his regular accent after staying in character throughout the audition process. "He totally burst out laughing," Watanabe recalled to PEOPLE. "He was in shock."Watanabe is glad that the times have somewhat changed since the film.
"Now it's been somewhat defined, but it's muddied still," Watanabe added. "But I think that the new Asian actors that are coming up, all the shows that are coming out, is really so exciting. It's great to see friends out there that aren't just one-dimensional characters.
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