Why was Linda Hunt chosen to play this part?

I found the gender of the actor playing Billy to be very distracting. I was waiting for Billy to reveal his true gender identity through the whole picture. Other than that, the movie was absolutely brilliant and made me long for my traveling days.

James

I once heard Weir say that someone (casting director?) showed him photos of various actors as possibilities to play Billy. The casting director included a picture of Hunt, mostly as a joke, not telling Weir that it was a woman. Weir thought the face was perfect for the character. When told that it was a woman and that the photo wasn't meant to be taken seriously, Weir was undeterred. He cast her anyway.

According to Peter Weir, he chose Linda Hunt simply because he couldn't find any male actor who could do it better. In fact is hard to imagine any other people (male or female) doing a better job than Linda Hunt.
During most part of the movie I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing. Linda wasn't a woman playing a man. Linda was an actor who happened to be woman playing a character that happened to be male. And she did it flawlessly.

Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan is one of the best performances EVER. As simple as that.

Just watched it.. again.. on cable. Linda Hunt was truly amazing in this role. Theatre is make-believe. Movies, even those based on real people and real events, are make believe. Good, kind people who are actors portray evil, horrible characters all the time. Evil, horrible people who are actors portray good, kind characters all the time. Women/men portray the opposite gender in films deliberately as part of their character, as in The Crying Game, Yentl, Victor/Victoria. I see no reason why a woman/man can't portray the opposite gender with no explanation if it is convincing, realistic, and the actor does a wonderful job. They are actors, they are asked to portray characters against their real selves all the time, whether it be race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic class, ability to play an instrument, sing, dance, and level of sanity. Which also allows Linda Hunt to portray a "eurasian/australasian/asian" or whatever she was supposed to be. Please don't use the overly obvious blackface/whiteface argument. And, let's not get ethnic heritage, race, and national origin, all mixed up in our minds, and let's not get reality confused with make-believe.

I have been reading some of the replies and posts about this subject and most non-Asian's don't seem to have a problem with this casting choice. Lets put this question in an upside down way... how well would this movie have done if they had a lesbian Asian woman play Mel Gibson's role?
I thought about this whole issue when I came across this post in my facebook stream...

http://whitetribalchief.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/the-story/comment-page-1/#comment-21

In addition to what lots of other people have already mentioned, I think having Linda Hunt play this role added an unexpectedly complex layer to Billy's character. Although he talks about loving Jilly and asking her to marry him, Billy does not come across as a typical "hot blooded male". Rather, he seems like a man whose sexual or romantic desires take the backseat to his concerns about the needs of the people of Indonesia. His passion is for helping the people and telling their stories through his lens.

Human perception is incredibly subtle. When I was watching this movie for the first time I could tell that Billy wasn't typically male, but I couldn't put my finger on it (being something like 12 at the time...there was a lot about the world I didn't understand yet). It wasn't until I re-watched it several years later that I began to understand what was tickling my brain. Billy's slight androgyny really emphasized his place as being "apart" from the others in the film. Of mixed race and of unusual stature, he occupies a different place in the world - one where he's looking on as much as he is participating. Adding in the androgynous element really reinforces this sense that Billy comes from a different plane than the other characters do.

Also, I've always been intrigued by Billy's relationship with both Jilly and Guy. The expressions that cross his face when he realizes that Guy and Jilly have gotten together are intensely complex - he's gotten what he wanted, but is that really what he wanted? And later, when he and Guy get into a fight and Billy yells that he "gave" Jilly to Guy, indicating a feeling of possession that is quite complex. If Billy had been played by a man, we as viewers may have jumped to an expectation that Billy and Guy were active rivals for the same woman. But by making Billy more androgynous we're removed from that expectation, and the result is much more interesting.

Those are my two cents, anyway. :)

She was absolutely brilliant in this movie.

When I first saw the film, probably more than twenty years ago as I was a teenager, I thought the character of Billy Kwan was a plain women pretending to be a man, and who had been accepted as such by those around "him", never telling them any different. Such as in real historical cases of women of unusual stature or appearance who had decided to become men, changing their dress, haircut and so forth. Some of them, and one particular case I remember specifically, married a widow with children and thus had a "regular" family life. When he died, the new widow discovered the real gender and said she'd never known. They'd never had relations but only been partners and friends.

In any case, this is what I felt of Billy, who obviously had romantic feelings, but having grown up a dwarf, had likely long accepted his affection or devotion would never be returned by anyone such as Gibson's and Weaver's characters. Billy had a "comfortable" situation with a woman and her child. Now I don't remember if the Asian woman was his wife or just someone who he cared for and took care of. It seemed an nonsexual relationship, and in general Billy seemed asexual, as in he didn't seem to have a physical relationship with anyone.

Billy was still a "man" (whatever his gender, whatever the actor's gender) in this sense, just the same, and I felt his passion for the people as a whole, for his work, his photography was his true outlet for his unfulfilled passionate desires. This, too, as he saw his death impending, was also tied into those feelings so that his end was almost a kind of fulfillment.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..." Roy Batty, Blade Runner.