I remember watching Multi-Facial once during a class in film studies. It's an autobiographical short, written, directed and starred in by a single bloke who made the whole thing on a 3000 dollar budget. It's about a guy who's going from audition to audition in Hollywood and he's killing it, but no one will hire him or even take him seriously as an actor because of his multiethnic appearance. Too black to be italian, not enough Wesley Snipes to be urban, not spanish enough to be hispanic, not white enough for anything. He keeps talking about his acting heroes, guys like De Niro, Brando and Sidney Poitier, all while he's tanking auditions for beer commercials and soap operas. There's this heartfelt moment during one audition where he does a monologue about his father, a black man who was a theatre actor and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and make him proud. He says that he has tried his best, but he felt that he was never black enough to do the man justice. "My dad died last year. Only then did I realise how ignorant I was, and the lack of credit I'd given my father," he says. "My dad was a black actor. But he wanted me to go one step further. He wanted me to be an actor. Just an actor. That's what he meant when he said proud."
Needless to say, he doesn't get the part because he has the wrong type of hair.
The guy is Vin Diesel. Steven Spielberg wrote a role for him in Saving Private Ryan after seeing the film on a festival where Diesel had sent it in after taking a loan to afford the submission fee.
It's a little bit sad how his career turned out since then. He really is talented. You could argue he's made a ton of money, but he deserved something better than dumb jock roles or that three-word mocap joke that Guardians of the Galaxy reduced him to. The guy is good enough to get cast by Sydney Lumet and Steven Spielberg, but 95% of his life's work is just generic action flicks where they needed a bulky guy to hold a gun or drive a car.
