Shredder Actor Tohoru Masamune On Michael Bay Defending Diversity

[IndigoErth]

There is a lot of text and the guy is rather rambling, so I will skip posting it all directly from the article and leave that up to whoever chooses to read it (or check out the podcast).

That said... Who am I to say since I wasn't there, but I dunno.. I really feel he's playing it too nice and giving Bay far too much credit for the change in Shredder actor. I mean, we all know why the change happened. And raises a brow imo over the suggestion that the movie was drastically redone for that when most of the time we see Shredder he is entirely CGI anyhow and we see Tohoru Masamune like, what, once? Since Fichtner got more than he did tacked on just to fix the character change.

https://www.comicbookmovie.com/teena...ersity-a177912

Shredder Actor Tohoru Masamune On Michael Bay Defending Diversity

We recently spoke with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles star Tohoru Masamune about Twitch's Artificial, and while chatting, he told us Michael Bay defended diversity by making two different 2014 films.


When people think of director Michael Bay (Transformers,) the first word that comes to mind probably wouldn't be diversity. However, a lot went on behind the scenes of Bay's 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when it came to the character of Shredder.

We recently chatted with the actor who played the villainous Shredder, Tohoru Masamune. Afterward, he mentioned to us that he wanted to have a follow-up interview to discuss something important to him: the diversity issues behind the scenes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

It seems that William Fichtner (Prison Break) was cast in the role initially, but after a multitude of whitewashing complaints, Bay spent a lot of extra money to film an entirely different movie in which an actor of Japanese descent played Shredder - hence Tohoru's casting.

Tohoru went into a lot of detail, and we chatted for nearly an hour! You can hear all the juicy bits in our audio component with the podcast embedded below!




Literary Joe: I was looking at that 2017 Forbes article you sent over. So if you want to use that as a jumping-off point to start talking about Shredder, that would be pretty cool.

Tohoru Masamune: So, it's kind of interesting too, because this is something that I don't think one thinks of Michael Bay and thinks political activism, protector of the free world, or whatever. I mean, I don't think one thinks that right off the bat, but you know, that's the interesting thing that came out of it. Maybe that's good. Maybe.

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And so, I don't know what his motivations were. I didn't get to know him that intimately that I could sit down and ask him what he was thinking. And it could have been a business decision, because he was certainly, if nothing else, an incredibly smart businessman. And maybe he saw that. He said, "You know what? I'm going to make more money if I do this." I don't know what his thinking was. I mean, that's what that article is referring to. There's a fear that somehow, maybe because you don't see what the business model is.

Continued at link