Legends of Tomorrow Star Tala Ashe Talks Her Appearance On Famous Cast Words

Tala Ashe (and her cats) recently appeared on Famous Cast Words, a All Arts series that goes behind the curtains in Hollywood and examines the culture of show business. Speaking to host Lynne Marie Rosenberg about her experiences on the show (as well as in other parts of her career on stage and screen), Ashe talks about Muslim and Middle Eastern/North African representation in American media. Speaking on her early career, she reflected on a “soul-crushing” role as a refugee early in her career, the number of “problematic” roles that are offered to people of color, and the power of saying “no.”

Speaking with ComicBook.com, Ashe iterated on that idea a little bit, talking about the importance of nuance in representation — the importance of having characters who are fully human, rather than being all good or all bad.

“As an actor, I am most often asked, especially on stage, to very narrowly represent the Middle Eastern experience,” Ashe explained. “I understand that we’re on a continuum of representation, and that’s maybe where we are in the Middle Eastern community, where we have to, and we should be, telling our own stories. And honestly, there’s a lot of work to be done there because still, still there are so many instances where we’re not part of the storytelling. I read a script recently that blew my mind that was about — I wonder if I should say — but it had an iteration of Iran in the title of the project, and not a single Iranian person was involved on the creative and producing side. That’s still very, very much happening.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to play something in some ways closer to myself, Tala, who is Iranian and proud of it, but I think it’s certainly not what I lead with,” Ashe added. “I grew up in Ohio. I sound like this. There’s something refreshing for it to not be the first thing that the character is leading with, or talking about. That said, I’ve sort of accepted that part of my journey as an actor, as an artist, is to do the lifting of representation. And so I’m sort of okay, and I’ve come to peace with doing that work, trying to do it with nuance and accuracy and sensitivity. I’ll tell you, it’s really nice once in a while for it to not come up, because for a lot of people it never does. Nobody ever talks about — or, it’s certainly not the first question to your average white person — ‘Tell me about your Irish heritage,’ or whatever it is. Whereas I can’t tell you how often I meet someone in the world and they’re like, ‘But where are you really from?’ So it’s true and it’s the reality, and I think it’s really nice when I have opportunities to just play a character where other attributes are leading the charge rather than ethnicity or skin color, all of those things which are important as well to tackle in other projects.”

You can see the episode below, or watch it here.

The other side of that very narrow idea of “representation” is something that Ashe dealt with on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: she was the first Muslim-American superhero in live-action DC or Marvel project. That’s obviously an honor for Ashe, but it’s also a strange thing to see all the time.

“First of all, I want to say I’m really proud of that. I take being a first very seriously, and I took that piece of that job very seriously,” Ashe told us. “I am proud that it is the thing that maybe comes up first on Google. And yeah, again, it’s not necessarily how I, Tala, would lead if I were introducing myself. But I was listening to an interview with Lily Gladstone the other day, and she was saying that in terms of representation and knocking down the door — I’m paraphrasing — it’s important to get in the door and then keep the door open. So in terms of the firsts, it’s great, but I feel like my job is to keep the door open in myriad ways that I can because it’s important obviously, these sort of groundbreaking things are important, but if it’s the last of the Muslim American superheroes, we have not actually evolved and advanced.”

You can see Famous Cast Words on ALL ARTS, a streaming platform and TV channel dedicated to the arts. DC’s Legends of Tomorrow streams on Netflix.