MovieChat Forums > The Great Raid (2005) Discussion > What non-Filipino actors can portray Fil...

What non-Filipino actors can portray Filipinos?


If they couldn't find any Filipino actors to play the Filipino roles in this movie, what other actors from other nationalities can they use? Can Hispanics portray Filipinos or will the producers stick to only Asian actors?

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Malayans, Indonesians, Thai, Cambodian, anybody that is southeastern Asian.

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hispanics portraying our people? ummmm............no. and yes anybody that is from southeast asia.

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i beg to disagree, but we filipinos do not exactly look like the nationalities you have mentioned. with all due respect to all these nationalities of course. besides, having to portray filipino roles is a big chance for filipino actors to break into hollywood ;)

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NOBODY!!!The Filipino actors did well in this film especially Cesar Montano.

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If one is just looking for physical look-alikes, Thais and Indonesians can be used to portray Filipinos. However, when I was watching the film, I heard the Filipinos talk in Filipino/tagalog so if the director had chosen non-Filipino actors he would have asked them to memorize a language that is foreign to them. I watched an old film with Mel Gibson as lead character. I forgot the title. I think it was "A Dangerous Life" or something like that. It was supposed to be a film set in Indonesia but was actually shot in the Philippines with Filipino actors playing the role of Indonesians. It was ludicrous to hear Filipino words being uttered by those supposed to be Indonesians. Maybe they thought only non-Filipinos would go out and watch the film and would not notice that the foreign language used was not actually Bahasa Indonesian.

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I think it was A Dangerous Life, but I only remember Gary Busey in it, not Mel.



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No, it was "A Year Of Living Dangerously" and it starred Mel Gibson.

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A lot of the supposed 'Filipinas' in the film didn't really look like they were from the Philippines, and their accents sounded different as well. Or did Filipino accents sound different in the 1940s??

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I also noticed the distracting affected accent of the Filipina friend/comrade of Connie Nielsen in the film. My guess is that the actress is either Filipino-American or Filipino-Aussie. She sounded like she was trying really hard to mask an American or Aussie twang. I don't think she was raised in the PHilippines. Her accent would be similar to Capt.Pantoja's if she was. The actress laid the accent pretty thick. Not authentic at all.



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If you're referring to the character Mina, then you're right. Natalie Mendoza was raised in Australia. I also caught her accent going in and out when seeing her in The Descent.

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1) The Philippines is rife with actors wanting to break into American film. I can't imagine the filmmakers having trouble finding native actors.
2) Public schools in the Philippines are taught in English; the filmmakers shouldn't have too much problem finding people who speak English because everyone pretty much does in addition to speaking Tagalog and/or their dialect.
3) The people of the Philippine Islands are themselves a unique mix of Malay (from Indonesia) and other indigeonous people, with Chinese, Japanese, and some Spanish, among others.

What other nationalities can they use? American. There are lots of Filipino-American actors who have trouble finding roles just for Asians/Pacific Islanders, let alone ones for Filipinos.

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Yup! English is not a problem in the Philippines
finding a job is. From what I heard the People up
North of the Philippines speak Spanish. Down South
they speak Arabic and in the middle part of the
Philippines, they speak all sort of languages from
Chinese, Japanese and English. :)

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Not quite. The "official" languages in the Philippines, throughout all the 7,000+ islands are Tagalog and English. And it's not really guaranteed the people in whatever region can speak either Tagalog or English, along side their own regional dialect. In the north they don't exclusively speak Spanish, nor just Spanish and English, but Tagalog and whatever their regional dialect is. There is one dialect, however, called Chavacano, that is a Spanish-based creole. And in the south, the Muslim population speak varieties of Malay-derived dialects, and Arabic is only spoken in Muslim school.

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well i think hispanics can look filipino..u get a lot mestizas in the philippines and my mummy is always mistaken for being spanish or european. But it depends i suppose :) i couldnt even tell you how many actors i've seen and thought "is he/she filipino" lol! you get dark, light, oriental, mixed..diverse range of appearances :)

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The people from the South don't speak Malay derived dialects, if you look at the hierarchy of tree of Austronesian languages, they belong to the Philippine branch, this branch is the oldest Malayo-Polynesian language.

They do have Malay loan words, BUT by Malay words, we mean Sanskrit & Arabic loan words adopted into Malay. So they're not really Malay words but Indo European words. It's like saying, if Indonesia & Malaysia adopted the word 'gusto' from Filipinos, it is now a Filipino loan word when really, it is actually Spanish.


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Filipinos are not from Indonesia, we came from the natives of Taiwan. It is the Indonesians & Malaysians who came from us. They are half Austronesian (what Filipinos are) &half AustroAsiatic (what Vietnamese are).



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The Rock.

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Filipinos are their own race. Indonesians are probably the most similar, but they're not exactly the same.

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