In a recent Instagram post, star actress of ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Chloe Bennet shared a sad but unsurprising tidbit about Hollywood: it’s still pretty damn racist. On an Instagram post about a recent white actor’s decision to step down from playing an Asian character, a commenter asked why she had changed her name. Bennet ended up sharing how her Chinese surname (Wang) kept her from getting hired in Hollywood.
Changing my last name doesn’t change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese. It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn’t cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable.
This isn’t the first time she’s called out Hollywood’s racism. In an interview with The Daily Beast last year, Bennet said changing her name gave instant results.
Four years ago, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD star Chloe Bennet was known professionally as Chloe Wang, aspiring actress and teenage dabbler in Shanghai pop stardom. In the states, however, Hollywood casting agents were less than welcoming.
At least until she changed her last name.
“Oh, the first audition I went on after I changed my name, I got booked,” Bennet tells The Daily Beast, in an interview timed to Marvel’s Women of Power month. “So that’s a pretty clear little snippet of how Hollywood works.”
Now Bennet is working to tackle this issue head-on. She founded an organization that works to improve representation for Asian American and Pacific Islander actors called (RUN), which stands for Represent Us Now. Check out the original Instagram post below: