It’s far from confirmed, but some early reports are coming out that Friday Night Lights, Chronicle, and Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan is under consideration to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot—and that his sister would be played by Allison Williams, making the formerly white siblings interracial:

According to The Wrap, Michael B. Jordan of Chronicle fame could take the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

We recently reported that Girls star Allison Williams was up for what we assumed was the role of Johnny’s sister Susan the Invisible Woman. Jordan is black and Williams is white, which raises questions regarding Johnny and Susan’s parentage in the film, considering they are brother and sister in the comics, but certainly adoption or making them step-siblings are among the options if both of these casting choices are finalized.

Jordan is a phenomenal actor, and the prospect of him leveling up to blockbusters should make people who like excellent performances very happy. Unfortunately, this news seems likely to prompt the same sorts of hysteria that came to the fore when Idris Elba, the black British actor, was cast as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge in the film adaptation of Thor, and when Nonso Anozie was cast as fabulously wealthy merchant in Game of Thrones. For some reason, there are certain fans of established particularly poorly when adaptations of their favorite material either change the race of a character in the transition from page to screen, or cast an actor of a race that the fans didn’t have the imagination to expect.

What’s striking about a lot of these characters is that, whether they’re written as white or not, their race doesn’t tend to be particularly important to their characterization. Johnny Storm is a playboy. Xaro is rich. Heimdall is impassive. These are the characteristics about them that are foregrounded in the texts where they originate. Of course, there are ways in which either illustrating those characters or assuming that they’re white inflect those characteristics. Johnny can probably get away with things that, were he black, might get him branded irresponsible or profligate. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing recently, the black-white wealth gap is a matter of public policy, and that produces different assumptions about how black and white characters, even in fiction, obtained their wealth. And big white men and big black men face obvious and different assumptions about their strength and what they might use it for. But even though these characters are assumed to be white—or there’s an assumption that they should continue to be portrayed by white actors—by fans, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to stay that way. If these characters aren’t used to explore whiteness, then there’s no reason for them to stay that way other than that fans prefer to see white people in those roles. And in the absence of specific white people competing for them, the objections don’t even become about specific things certain actors might bring to the role. It’s just about whiteness.

Sometimes, casting a black actor in a role previously assumed to be white won’t make that role about blackness either, nor should it. One would hope that Asgard and Westeros (or Essos) haven’t somehow managed to replicate America’s racial politics, or that in worlds with gods and dragons, people of color aren’t the things that are implausible, or that stand out most. But if people want to defend keeping characters white, and if reverse racebending is going to work right and put more non-white actors in roles where race doesn’t matter to the characters, I hope these conversations don’t stop there. It would be terrific to see more thought put into what living as both a white person and a person of color bring to certain characters. Not all stories are explicitly about race, and not every experience characters have is defined solely about their racial or ethnic experience. But considering race among many other factors, including class, gender, and sexual orientation is a way to build out a character, and a whole world.

Idris Elba poaching eggs and hanging out on the beach and having great ties is basically the inverse of waiting for election results, so have that instead of tuning in to whatever television station is not going to actually have useful, anxiety-dispelling information to offer you yet:

Hang in there. I’ll be over on the main page liveblog keeping an eye on media coverage and other shenanigans.

The rumors that Idris Elba will follow Daniel Craig as the next James Bond come and go, but they’re back again. I’m obviously in favor of this potential development on the grounds that Idris Elba is awesome (though I also think you could make great cases for David Oyelowo or Chiwetel Ejiofor) and it would give me an excuse to make a lot of “Able was I, ere I saw Elba” jokes. But there are a lot of reasons that it would be great to have a black Bond, and Elba in particular, beyond his simple excellence as an actor:

1. It would clarify that Bond is a rotating identity: James Bond is sort of like that other venerable British pop cultural institution, the Doctor. He’s been around for decades, he’s played by a rotating cast of actors, and there’s not the most rigorous continuity between incarnations, particularly between the old-school ones and the re-imagined version. But unlike the Doctor, Bond doesn’t have a clear means of passing the torch. A black Bond would be a clear break with tradition. The franchise could either nod at what this means for James Bond as an identity unmoored from a single man’s identity (it would explain why M likes Daniel Craig’s Bond more than Pierce Brosnan’s), or come up with a mythology for passing it on to the next man. Either way, this would permanently open up the franchise to different kinds of men, allowing for some experimentation in styles within the basic elements of Bond-dom.

2. It would be a nice reminder white guys aren’t the only people who can be hypercompetent national icons: It’s not as if Will Smith hasn’t been saving American bacon for a long time. But it’s one thing for a black man to be the unexpected savior of the world and for him to be anointed as the best a nation has to offer. It’s past time.

3. It would give Elba a chance to play a lover, as well as a fighter: I’ve written about this before in the context of Luther, but given how good Elba is at playing sensual, passionate, or nailing the contours of a difficult marriage, it’s too bad that so many of his roles have steered him away from being romantic or sexual and strictly towards the commission of a great deal of very stylish violence. Bond girls (or in Eva Green’s case, Bond Women) are an inherent part of the package. It would be lovely to have Elba in particular and a prominent black actor in general get a chance to play one of the world’s most famous seducers in a context where it’s evidence of his awesomeness, rather than a showcase for suspect stereotypes about black men and sexuality.

4. It might encourage the franchise to think more creatively about other elements of the Bond formula: Casino Royale worked so well because it upended almost every element of the excess that marked the Brosnan years: the villain was pegged to actual geopolitical realities, the decisive action sequences went down in a polite casino private room rather than on a grand tableaux, the violence was personal and painful rather than flashy and fake, the woman in question’s brain mattered as much as her breasts. Craig’s helped bring the franchise part of the way into the future. Maybe a black Bond would augur even further exploration of the limits of the formula.

5. It would be interesting to see a slightly older Bond: Daniel Craig remains under contract as Bond for a while, and I’ve seen some suggestions that Elba couldn’t take the role until he turns 46. Part of what was fun about Craig in Casino Royale was that the movie was an origin story about how a callow, confident young spy lost something and gained mastery as a result. It would be fascinating to see a movie that’s self-consciously about a great fighter and great lover entering the period of his decline, sort of a Casanova In Bolzano for the action world.

Idris Elba talked to Vulture about Pacific Rim, the monster movie by Guillermo Del Toro he’s starring in, and wow does it sound incredible:

He’s yet another man of authority, but this time much higher up. He’s the head of the army and the army is the essential fighting force against these monsters. The world is crumbled and this alien lived underneath the surface of the Earth for a long time. Our only defense has been these massive robots that fight back — they’re basically tanks that are put together to look like men and can walk. I play the leader of that sort of movement. Then we lose our funding, basically, and the world decides to build walls around countries, which basically means the rich can get in and the poor can’t. So our characters go, “No. We’re going to fight this our way.” It could be a box-standard, fight-against-the-aliens sort of film, but not with Guillermo.

It sounds like it’s almost a commentary on class and immigration.

Well, it’s certainly a commentary on if the world were under attack who would survive and who wouldn’t. Interestingly enough, the poor would probably more survive than the rich.

Why is that?

Because they have less and are used to less; therefore, more resilient and more tough. If an alien attacks a big skyscraper, people in the skyscraper are going to die. The people on the floor may not.

It’s often splashier and scarier to pit humans against aliens in science fiction, and to portray alien invasion as an engineer of a new, happy, human solidarity. But we’re a lot likely to get fierce international and inter-class struggle and competition before we end up in a fight with spacemen. That Del Toro is acknowledging that and giving us his signature awesome monster design has me very, very excited indeed.

This is pretty amazing: Idris Elba is going to be playing Nelson Mandela in a new biopic. Normally, I’d say we absolutely don’t need another Mandela biopic. But I think this project is intriguing because it’s meant to focus on Mandela’s on younger years, before he became an icon of non-violent resistance, when he was saying things like this:

Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

It’s easy to forget, and a lot of people do, that Mandela was imprisoned in the first place in part for his involvement in the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which was the armed wing of the African National Congress. If you think about it, casting the guy who played Stringer Bell as a political activist who is trying to organize a unit that was capable of carrying out sabotage and guerilla warfare makes a lot of sense. I’d actually really love to see David Simon, or someone with his sense of organizations, write a big movie about South African anti-apartheid leadership and the apartheid regime.

The totally unsubstantiated rumor that Idris Elba could be the next James Bond (really, discussion of the True Fact that he would be awesome at it) is back! I think it’s true that Elba, particularly after his amazing turn on Luther, has demonstrated that he has the chops to succeed Daniel Craig. For me, Craig’s main accomplishment, particularly in Casino Royale, was to define Bond who can take a tremendous amount of punishment as well as dish it out, and someone who has tremendous emotional vulnerabilities that he keeps mostly very well-disguised.

And beyond that, I think there’d be some real power, especially for American audiences, in a black Bond. It’s not like we don’t have black cops, black soldiers, and black spies. The Craig movies even gave Bond a black American counterpart, though Jeffrey Wright has very little time on-screen. But given the way our dialogues around black men and violence have failed to evolve; our widespread comfort with the state-sanctioned killing of black men, whether by the police or as part of an execution process; the way our pop culture depictions of black men overwhelmingly show them committing illegal acts violence rather than legitimized ones; I think there would be something significant about a depiction of a black cultural icon who has a license not just to protect people, but a license to kill, and not in self-defense.

In no particular order, things mostly political thoughts that struck me about the shows and roles that garnered Emmy nominations this year:

1. No love for Archer? I don’t adore the show, but it’s spiky and smart, a useful deconstruction of espionage in a pop culture that generally lionizes spies. And the animated programs feel tremendously calcified.

2. The movie or miniseries and casting nominations for Cinema Verite and Too Big to Fail are richly deserved. I loved both movies, which I thought were smart, stylish, and really valuable and entertaining distillations of big issues — the blurring line between reality and entertainment, and the financial crisis. Both augur good things for the large number of political projects HBO has on its slate.

3. Louis C.K. deserves every accolade he gets. I doubt he’ll beat Steve Carrell or Alec Baldwin for best actor in a comedy, but where those two performances toe up to the vast ocean of male insecurity and run away from it, Louis goes swimming in it. Presumably with his shirt on over a bathing suit.

4. Ditto for Idris Elba. The lack of Emmy love for The Wire or David Simon more generally is mystifying. But I do think Luther uses more of Elba’s range than Stringer Bell. And I’d like to see more British shows with short seasons get in the Emmy pool through the miniseries or movie category, if they’re not going to get in through the main series ones. I haven’t watched The Big C yet, so I’m yet to form an opinion on his guest role there, but clearly he’s an Emmy favorite. It’ll be interesting to see if an American network notices that and acts accordingly.
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