Netflix Christmas film has Asian-American actor front and centre – instead of as sidekick or comic relief. It’s still a rarity

With the holiday season in full swing, studios and TV networks have been screening tales in which the Christmases are predominantly white

Breaking the mould, Netflix and Universal movies will feature Asian leads in holiday movies this year

Reading Time:4 minutes

Anna Akana (left) and Liv Hewson star in Netflix’s Christmas movie Let It Snow, one of the few holiday-season movies with an Asian-American in a lead role. Photo: AP

Published: 4:00pm, 21 Dec 2019Updated: 4:00pm, 21 Dec 2019

With its multiple teenage characters, the Netflix movie Let It Snow is a mix of a holiday feel-good film and a John Hughes comedy. But unlike those genres, the movie, about a small town besieged by a Christmas Eve snowstorm, has Asian-American characters front and centre who aren’t there just to be comedic relief.

Jacob Batalon (Marvel’s Spider-Man movies) and Anna Akana (Ant-Man) play an aspiring DJ and closeted lesbian cheerleader respectively. For Akana, nothing felt token about the role.

“I never felt like I’d been cast because ‘This girl checks the gay box and the Asian box’,” says Akana, who is of Japanese, Filipino and Hawaiian descent. “We were finally seeing the world as we’ve known about it, and Hollywood is slowly catching up.”

With the holiday season in full swing, studios and TV networks have been unwrapping tales in which the Christmases are mainly white. The diversity issue was skewered on Saturday Night Live in a skit about the Hallmark Channel, which generated a firestorm recently for dropping ads featuring a same-sex couple.

Jacob Batalon (left) with Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Universal Pictures’ Last Christmas, with Crazy Rich Asians stars Henry Golding and Michelle Yeoh, is an exception to the pattern of films that relegate Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders from lead roles. Latinos also rarely make the cut. However, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of black actors in movies from Hallmark and Lifetime TV channels and niche outlets like the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).