Why representation that looks inclusive on the surface often flattens identity—and how real storytelling begins only when we move beyond stereotypes.
Picture this: I walk into a casting room, dressed to play a lead detective in a new crime series—hair sleeked back into a low bun, a tailored suit, a crisp white shirt, heels clicking with confidence. I’ve nailed the self-tape, hit every beat, and I’m excited to bring her to life. The casting assistant I’ve been working with beams with pride—or so I feel— having found a detective who feels fresh, yet carries all the gravitas of the genre’s greats. Nailed the lead-detective energy, right?
Then the casting director, seated a little apart, glances up from her screen. She takes one sweeping look at me, head to toe. I can almost hear the shift in her mind. To her, I’m not a detective; I’m a cultural collage—chai, yoga, Bollywood, a shimmer of silk and incense.
“Perfect,” she says brightly. “Starbucks Chai Latte commercial. Background, but featured.”
I shrink. My lead-detective energy crumbles like a Marie biscuit dipped too long in masala chai. I resist the urge to give them the infamous side-to-side headshake—the one they’re expecting me to deliver in my performance. Tears prick behind my eyes, but they don’t fall. The moment dissolves into the day’s routine, absorbed by the quiet normalization of hundreds of moments just like it.
This quiet bias becomes impossible to ignore in Hollywood, where perception is everything and identity often turns into costume.
As a South Asian woman working as an actor, I have learned that I am often seen before I am heard. Even before I speak a line or step into a role, my body, my face, and my perceived culture begin telling a story on my behalf.
This lesson—of being read before being heard—has followed me into casting rooms, where diversity may be celebrated in theory but remains nothing more than filling a performative quota.
Over time, I’ve come to recognize the pattern: the industry’s idea of inclusion still operates within preapproved lanes. The result is what I call canned diversity—the illusion of inclusion packaged for easy consumption. Diversity that looks good on a poster but rarely has depth on screen.
On Being Born a Firecracker
Born on a luminous Deepavali morning, I entered the world amid loud fireworks and a dramatic reaction. My grandfather already had five grandsons from his two sons. He was hoping for a perfect hat trick—three grandsons from each son in the family—but I was the unexpected player who stumped him.
I learned this story years later. It made me realize that identity is often stitched to our skin—gender, culture, ethnicity—long before we ever say our first word. That was my first, though certainly not my last, brush with the invisible scripts that make people believe they’ve read the whole book just by looking at the cover. (Thankfully, unlike my grandfather, my parents were thrilled to welcome a daughter.)
Those invisible scripts don’t van- ish when you move across borders; if anything, they multiply. When you call another country home, the identity crisis is real—not just for you, but also for others who struggle to place you neatly into their geography of belonging. It’s the question that follows every immigrant: Where are you actually from?
Before I open my mouth to answer, there’s often a triumphant “Ah, Indian! I knew it!” I smile, happy to have made their day and to have given them a small CSI moment. I’ve learned not to take these questions negatively. Mostly, I’m glad they’re curious and want to know me beyond the surface.
These moments are interpersonal and relatively harmless—small curiosities that don’t shake the foundations of one’s life. But what happens when that same curiosity enters the workplace and turns into judgment? In a job interview, are they asking about your qualifications or silently wondering how your ethnicity might color your work ethic, temperament, or “fit”?
It’s this subtle shift from interest to inference that reveals how preconceived notions of identity can quietly tip the scales before merit ever enters the room.
Checklist Clichés
As a South Asian actor, I’m often asked to play a part from a checklist of clichés that have everything to do with my looks: the henna-handed healer, the crystal-clutching yoga teacher, the spiritual best friend who speaks in proverbs. The looks may vary, but the story remains the same. The moment I walk into a room, I can feel the assumptions beginning to take shape— sometimes before I even say hello. I’ve been asked to “look more ethnic,” to “bring that Bollywood energy,” to “channel your inner mystic.”
The irony in all of this is that many of us labeled “exotic” have lived lives that are anything but so narrow. We are journalists, scientists, soldiers, mothers. We are immigrants who have crossed continents and languages. Yet those complexities seldom make it to the screen.
The industry’s push for inclusion has undeniably brought more faces of color into view, but too often without the depth that makes those faces fully human. Token storylines abound—the diversity hire, the sidekick, the cultural garnish that decorates a plot without altering it. What passes for representation can feel more like ornamentation. Inclusion without imagination, after all, is just replication with better lighting.
Who Gets to Write the Story?
The problem doesn’t begin in the casting room; it starts at the writing desk and in the boardroom. When gatekeepers of storytelling—writers, producers, agents, publishers—operate with limited worldviews, the stories that reach audiences inevitably mirror that narrowness. We don’t just need more stories; we need fuller ones.
As both an author and an actor, I strive to do exactly that and to portray people in their three-dimensional totality. Still, the struggle is real. Querying agents are prone to protecting the familiar, avoiding risk, and preferring the safety of time-tested, market-proven narratives.
The entertainment industry reflects the stories that are commissioned and sold, and publishing feeds that pipeline. If manuscripts reaching editors already echo the same archetypes, what chance does an actor have of breaking free on set? Authentic re-presentation must begin with storytellers who are willing to challenge the status quo and embrace the reality of diversity.
What Bridgerton Got Right
Consider the global success of Bridgerton, a Regency-era series that reimagined empire through a richly diverse lens. I still remember the moment Simone Ashley, as Kate Sharma, walked into the frame—dusky-skinned, confident, her hair swept up, draped in a jewel-toned gown that shimmered like it had been spun from every sari I had ever known. For a fleeting second, I saw someone who looked like me at the center of a grand love story—not as a guest or a background flourish in someone else’s fantasy, but as the fantasy itself. She didn’t merely enter the ballroom, she commanded it— rewriting centuries of who was allowed to be desired, seen, or adored.
Audiences embraced her without hesitation. That alone should prove that viewers aren’t afraid of change, only the industry is. People are ready for nuance, complexity, and authenticity. They crave stories that reflect the world’s messy, intertwined beauty—not a checkbox version of it.
True inclusion isn’t about erasing cultural identity; it’s about expanding it. Because real people are full of contradictions. We can be both South Asian and Southern, we can be Bollywood fans who also love country music, we can be engineers who write poetry at midnight. We can pray, protest, and laugh at ourselves in the same breath. But when the camera flattens us into one dimensional types, it erases the very humanity that diversity was meant to celebrate.
Refusing the Mold
For actors like me, the challenge— and the hope—lies in refusing to fit neatly into the expected mold. Some- times that means walking out of an audition that feels reductive; sometimes it means staying and giving the stereotype an unexpected depth. It’s a delicate rebellion, but it’s how change begins—one audition, one role, one story at a time.
I’ve loved the opportunities where I’ve had to step into new worlds— playing an Egyptian queen in Black Adam, a South Asian tourist turned to stone in Shazam!, and even the eccentric, wealthy soulmate of the Hulk in She-Hulk. Each role, however brief, offered a glimpse of what representation can look like when approached with imagination.
But there have also been moments when I’ve had to draw a line. Once, I was invited to audition for a major video game franchise—a “magical, mystical lady” who appears when players lose their way, offering guidance and grounding. It was an important role, with the potential to shape how thousands of young players experience the boundary between reality and fantasy. Yet the creative direction quickly drifted toward the familiar—to make her more “Bollywood mystical,” less real. Not wanting to be part of such stereotyping, I declined the role. Because if we don’t defend the truth of who we are, we cannot expect the story to change.
We Are the Story
When we ask for true diversity, we are not asking for favors. We are asking for freedom—the freedom to be fully human, not cultural ornaments. The conversation about representation cannot stop at counting faces; it must also ask whose stories are being told and who gets to tell them.
The only way to challenge the industry’s canned diversity is to do our part by cleaning up the mirror, by understanding that the invisible scripts that once defined us are only as powerful as we allow them to be, and by mustering the courage to rewrite the script, to move beyond tokenism and toward truth. By recognizing that we are not resigned to be “color” in someone else’s story— we can be the story.
Sumi Seissinger is a writer, actor, journalist, and columnist whose career has spanned four continents. She has served as area manager of Khaleej Times and editor-in-chief of Dalian Today. Her forthcoming novel, We the Unafraid, explores courage in the age of extremism. Her work is deeply shaped by lived experi- ences across India, the Middle East, Ger- many, China, and her permanent home in the United States.