I’d like to introduce you all to someone. His name is Jake Gyllenhaal:

Jake Gyllenhaal as Prince Dastan in Prince of Persia

He’s playing Prince Dastan in Jerry Bruckheimer’s adaptation of the Prince of Persia video games, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. That’s the first official publicity shot of Jake as Prince Dastan, right up there, and that down there is a newly-released (or maybe that should be newly-leaked, since it seems there hasn’t been an official release) trailer.

So… here’s the thing. Jake, as lovely as he surely is, lacks a certain something I think is necessary for this role. I call it, Persian heritage. Now, I’ve never actually played the PoP video games, but I’m sure there are glaring inaccuracies and ways they could have been more sensitive to Persian culture. Accurately representing any culture for mainstream consumption is hard. Doing so when it’s not your culture, so you haven’t been thoroughly inducted into its complications and contradictions since birth? Even harder. However, whatever the flaws of those video games, they have this movie beat in at least one major way: the Prince character is always (barring one exception, 2008′s Prince of Persia) Persian.

It’s not that I don’t think Jake can’t play the character. He’s a good actor; I’m sure he can. What I’m most annoyed about is the fact that there are 3575886960703758 roles “for” white actors in Hollywood; either the role is specifically about a white character, or the script/story doesn’t specify race, which of course means the character is white. (What other ethnicity could John or Julie or Serena or whatever possibly be, right?) This is a character that is canonically of Middle Eastern descent and—amazingly!—not a terrorist, Bedouin or oil sheikh. This is one role that is “for” Middle Eastern actors. Why can’t one actually be cast?

Jake’s not a proven action star, so that’s not the reason. Maybe because he’s so darn cute? That seems as logical a reason as any. So, an exercise: how many Middle Eastern characters can I find that are at least as attractive?

The List:

- Haaz Sleiman, who’s currently portraying Mo-Mo on Nurse Jackie.
- Oded Fehr, Carlos in the Resident Evil franchise and Ardeth in The Mummy franchise.
- Osamah Sami, an Aussie actor who’s worked in theatre and TV.
- Antonio Albadran, whose big-screen work includes (or may be limited to, I’m not really clear on that part) the Kurt Russell/Dakota Fanning flick Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story.
- Don Hany, another Aussie.
- Zaib Shaikh, who’s currently starring on CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie.

Admittedly, finding Middle Eastern actors wasn’t a total breeze. But if I could find six with proven acting chops, experience working in the Western film industry and who aren’t hard to look at, why can’t Hollywood’s many casting directors find viable options?

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