"I now understand that people of color should always voice people of color. We missed a great opportunity to represent the Vietnamese-American community..."

"... accurately and respectfully, and for that I am truly sorry. I applaud all those who stepped away from their voiceover roles in recent days. I have learned a lot from them. In hindsight, I wish that I didn’t voice the character of Diane Nguyen," wrote Alison Brie, about her role on the animated TV show "Bojack Horseman," quoted at Vulture.

Bojack Horseman showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg has also expressed regret over Diane’s casting, recently explaining his decision on Twitter and telling Vulture in 2018, “I allowed myself to believe that the world of animation was a little different than the world of live action. It is in some ways, but that’s not really a good excuse.” Bojack Horseman wrapped up its sixth and final season in January 2020.

So it's all over. No going back. Might as well express regret. Maybe he just regrets that he casually stuck a Vietnamese name on the character. Was there anything really "represent[ative] the Vietnamese-American community" about Diane Nguyen on "Bojack Horseman"?!

How awful for these artists to cave to manipulation to disavow their own good work! I'm guessing Bob-Waksberg originally thought it was cool to use a Vietnamese name for a character without it meaning anything more than just a little casual diversity. He didn't know he would bite him in his Horseman ass one day.

Here's an interview with Bob-Waksberg from September 2018 (also at Vulture):

[Y]ou talked about the casting of Alison Brie as Diane Nguyen as the “original sin” of the show. Would you do things differently if you were casting now?

Yes... The issue of diversity in general is a little different than a white person playing an Asian person. I do want to be careful to keep those conversations somewhat distinct even though they are absolutely related. One thing I would do differently outside of Diane is, I don’t want to have a show that has all white people in the main cast. I think that is inappropriate.

 A show that has all white people in the main cast is inappropriate. Inappropriate!

I don’t know how else to say it. I think that it is bad politically, but I also think it is bad creatively. It leads to a less interesting show, and that was a mistake.

It's like a gun-to-the-head confessional. I love the utter bullshit of the assertion that the core motivation is to be interesting. If all your characters are white, it's less interesting!

So that is 100 percent something I would do differently. And the other thing is, I would not cast a white person to play an Asian character. That is also something that is inappropriate. I knew at the time that it was somewhat inappropriate, but I don’t think I realized quite what it meant and what I was doing, and I allowed myself to believe that the world of animation was a little different than the world of live action. It is in some ways, but that’s not really a good excuse.

What shifted your thinking?

Is anyone anticipating an honest answer here?

I will say, you [i.e., E. Alex Jung] shifted my thinking somewhat. The podcast you did with Aisha [Harris], you said something that really stuck with me, because up until that point the general criticism I’d seen of the character from Asian people was, “It’s really great to have this nuanced, fully formed, Asian-American character who is not a stereotype, but it’s a bummer that she’s played by a white actress and it’s hard to separate from that. That’s an asterisk.” And one of the things you said on the podcast really surprised me because it was not that. [It] was that, if you knew you had Alison Brie in the show, why didn’t you just make her a white character? The idea that having another white character would have been better than this odd approximation of what an Asian-American character is shook me, surprised me, and made me really think of it in a different way. It made me realize, “Oh, this is hurtful. It’s not just a bummer or inconvenient or not ideal. This is bad.” I’m still grappling with that and what I can do now to fix it.... 

Yeah, it's too late to just give the character a non-race-specific name, but he (as I suspected, above) wishes he'd done just that.

Does it surprise you how quickly this conversation around race and voice-acting has accelerated?

No, the opposite. I was prepared to have this conversation when season one dropped, and I was surprised that it didn’t happen then.... I thought what we were doing was colorblind casting. I really did, and because of that, I wasn’t actively looking for people of color, and then it turns out we had a bunch of white people. Moves need to be made to be more inclusive. One way to go about that is setting ground rules for yourself, such as, “If you have a character of color it’s going to be voiced by a person of color.” That feels like a great step one.

I still struggle with the question of “Should Diane just be a white woman?” I always wonder, what is Asian-American? There’s a multiplicity of answers, but for me it’s a feeling of recognition where I see it and I know it. When I’m considering the “original sin,” it’s not about casting as much as it’s about the writers room. The fact that there weren’t Asian writers in the room the past season is what I come back to. Do you see that as a weakness of the show that needs to be addressed? I realize that even raises a boatload of other concerns like, “Oh, we need to hire the Asian person to write about Asianness,” which also feels shitty....

Yikes. He switched to referring to Asian-Americans as Asian! He needed more Asians in the room — he says now, now that it's too late to have just made Diane a white woman, and even as he's acknowledging that going for more Asians in the room also feels shitty. By the way, the main character is a horse. What race is the horse? Why not make them all animals?

I have a policy of not firing writers without cause. If I look at a room and it’s all white people — and we’ve never had an all-white writers room — but let’s say we had a room that’s mostly white people and I go, “Oops, I’m not happy about this,” I don’t feel comfortable not asking one of those writers back to make room for an Asian writer....

Yeah, because that would be overt employment discrimination. I wonder if when he looks in the mirror and sees a white man, he goes “Oops, I’m not happy about this.”

In a Tumblr post back in the day, you wrote about how “male” is often prefigured as “default” whereas “female” isn’t. It also makes me think about neutrality with regards to race, too, and how whiteness is often seen as neutral. Do you see BoJack as white?

I don’t, although I understand that he can be read that way, and in certain ways he’s coded as white.

He's talking about a horse. A horseman.

I don’t consciously write him that way, although I think there are more white people he is like than other people. I would like people to bring their own reads on him. Someone once told me that she saw BoJack as a black man, as a black person herself, because she felt like she really related to the idea that he was the one horse on his show, and that he doesn’t have any horse friends, and he’s “the one who made it.” I can’t say, “Yes, that’s right, that’s what we’re doing,” but I love that interpretation, and so I’m happy for people to make their own reads on it.... What does “race” mean in a world where animals exist? What does it mean to be a black American or an Asian-American when there are also anteaters walking around?

What does it mean to be a black American or an Asian-American when there are also anteaters walking around?