Short form: a young black actress was hired as an extra to play a younger version of a character portrayed by an older black actress. When she went in for her makeup, the makeup department was tasked with making sure the younger actress looked like a younger version of the older actress, so they matched the skin tone. This has been determined to be Problematic.
If you read the article *and* the comments, the answer is quite simple: HBO should not have hired this young actress, but instead another one who looked like the older actress, both structurally and skin tone, so no makeup change would have been required. Since skin tones can vary *wildly* from one person to another, this would have slashed the pool of potential hires drastically.
HBO, of course, has already started cranking out the grovelling apologies for using makeup to make an actress look like the character she was hired to portray. Hopefully they will learn from this lesson and never again apply makeup to an acting unit that changes their skin tone. Instead, they should do the only fair and honest thing: completely computer generated characters. When there is the slightest worry of woke outrage, replace all Actrons Of Outrage with an off-the-street hire in a mocap suit.
Behold your new Black Panther:
One of the numerous advantages of doing it this way is that actors will gradually cease to be recognizable by the public. Characters in movies might be based on scans of real people, but those people would be just random acting-talentless schmoes who sold their image rights. No longer will there be actrons demanding vast sums for the sequels, or shows getting their legs cut out from under them because one of the stars got MeTooed or arrested or died or some other nuisance. And characters, being computer generated, can be not only made to look however the movie/show makers want, they can have little slider bars in the setup screen to let the viewers select how the characters look. This is done commonly enough in video games, where you can select just about every conceivable feature for the character you portray; doing this with movies is just a matter of time. Imagine how much less the JJVerse Star Trek movies woulda sucked if you could adjust a littler slider that allowed you to set the “how different from actual Star Trek” appearance… not just the actors, but the ship designs, aliens, uniforms, etc. (a slider that allows you to select “how much does the plot and writing suck” would be nice too, but that’s probably a little further out)
