Movie Typecasting

I watched Dysturbia the other night while at a hotel in Washington, DC - work trip. The lead actor is rising star Shia LeBeouf (also of Transformers and the new Indiana Jones movie). When I went to www.imdb.com to check out his body of work I clicked on his most recent project New York, I Love You which comes out next year. When I scrolled that movie's cast of characters I saw that a friend from high school, Vedant Gokhale, was in the movie.

I've only seen Vedant once since high school and that was at our 10-year high school reunion in 2005. I recall Vedant sharing with me that he was going into acting, after becoming a lawyer and not liking it. So from Vedant's IMDB profile, it seems like he's starting to build an acting career - though I wonder if he still practices law on the side to make a steady income.

After I got past the excitement that I could see a friend of mine on the silver spring, I got pissed that so far he's almost always played a culturally stereotyped role of an Indian - his parents immigrated to the U.S. from India as adults and he and his brothers were born here.

In this movie, Vedant plays a seemingly minor role as the "cab driver. "

While I bet Vedant is happy to just break into the movie business, it's unfortunate that non-White Americans are so often casted in a culturally stereotypical way.