Mortal Kombat is a global franchise. There are over 60 main characters throughout the games, hailing from different nations and backgrounds from all over the world (and sometimes beyond it), which makes sense for a story about a group of warriors fighting for the fate of the Earth against invaders from a parallel realm. For the cast and crew of the upcoming reboot, arriving in theaters and on HBO Max next month, it was important to make sure the film faithfully represented the diversity of the franchise’s characters, and by extension the diversity of Mortal Kombat’s global fanbase.
During a 2019 set visit that Collider attended along with some other reporters, producer Todd Garner spoke about how director Simon McQuoid was allowed to pursue a cast that authentically represented the characters as opposed to chasing major box office stars. “All those characters for the first time in a movie are really cast appropriately, whatever nationality they are,” he said. “And it was a testament to Warner Bros. and New Line to allow us to do that. I mean, you notice there’s big name actors for their genres [in our cast], but… there’s no Christopher Lambert in the movie.” (Lambert, a white actor, portrayed the Japanese thunder god Raiden in the 1995 original.)
The cast echoed Garner’s comments about McQuoid’s dedication to making Mortal Kombat as inclusive as possible. “I’ve never worked with someone that’s so serious about being authentic for another culture,” Ludi Lin, who plays the franchise’s iconic Shaolin hero Liu Kang, said of McQuoid. “He was so fixated on, you know, ‘Which dialect is the name ‘Kung Lao’ from? Is it Mandarin? Is it Cantonese?’ He really wanted to cast someone that is really authentic to it, that has the right origin, the right ethnicity, the right background. And to each individual character, it was that way. It feels so open.”
Lin went on to compare his experience working on Mortal Kombat with other Hollywood projects where he was the only Asian person in the cast, and why being part of a big budget film with a multinational group of actors was so important to him:
"One thing I really wanted to dispel in my career, what gives my work meaning, is a lot of tokenism that’s seen in minorities and ethnicities in Hollywood films. I just don’t understand why there can only be one! Do we really apply to the Highlander myth so much that there can only be one? I was on another film, and I was the only Asian character in the whole film, so I asked the director, 'Can I at least have another extra that’s Asian?' It was kind of a period piece in America, on the civil rights movement, and I’m like, 'Can I just have one? Literally just one more Asian on the cast?' And he was like, 'Oh, it just didn’t happen back then.' … Look - 60% of the world is Asian. A quarter of the world is Chinese. And the thing about Mortal Kombat that grips me, I was thinking, 'Why has the game gone through 11 different iterations?' It’s the characters. It’s such a diverse mesh of characters, and they’re all so interesting. And on this film, there are so many different types of people, different ethnicities from different origins and different backgrounds, and it really represents the world. If you want a film right now to carry throughout the world, which is all films right now. No film is local anymore, all films are going to be seen by people all over the world, you want to represent the world in the right way. And in the world, there’s not token Asians… The casting for this film feels really authentic, and that’s much credit to Simon for sure. He’s very serious about it. We don’t have to discuss it. Everyone feels it… And it feels right. It feels so comfortable to be meshed within a cast, coworkers and friends from different places. And we have no conflict, no struggle, we’re just trying to tell a great story."
The Night Comes For Us star Joe Taslim, who plays the murderous ninja Sub-Zero, had similar feelings about his role in the film. “There’s not many people from Indonesia who made it to Hollywood, only so far me and [Iko Uwais, Taslim’s costar in The Night Comes for Us and The Raid: Redemption],” he said. “For us, me and Iko, we’re very fortunate… Every time we do an international project, we always think that it’s not just for us, this will be representing 250 million people. There’s a big population there. If we can do it, we hope that the young generation there, they have the confidence that they can do it too. Like what inspired me.”
Taslim went on to explain the value of having an inclusive cast, not only to make films like Mortal Kombat more authentic, but also to normalize the idea of living in a global community. “The world is more diverse now,” he said. “Movies [are] a great bridge to connect the world to each other… And we have a very diverse cast in this movie. This movie is going to represent the world.”
Mortal Kombat hits theaters and HBO Max April 16.