Readers of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem were in for a surprise when they saw the television version written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo for Netflix. The characters, who were Chinese on the page, had changed their origin when transferred to the screen. This, as I said from this same website, could lead to a reading: by creating a more racially diverse cast, it contributed to the erasure of the Chinese identity from history, which is not exactly the most visible audiovisual in the West. And, according to Woo, who teamed up with the creators of Game of Thrones to adapt Cixin, it was a matter of necessity.
“As a matter of necessity, we needed more of the cast to speak in English,” explained the screenwriter. This suggests that, while Netflix was willing to give them the budget to bring the ambitious story to the platform’s catalog, they wanted The 3 Body Problem to be an English production. Hence, the viewer, instead of seeing actors of Chinese descent in front of the cameras, found a much more diverse cast.
Thus, instead of having Wang Miao, Cheng Jin Cheng, Tatiana Haas, Will Downing, Jack Rooney or Raj Varma, played by actors such as Jovan Adepo, John Bradley, Eiza González, Alex Sharp, Saamer Usmani or Jess Hong.
“The Chinese flashbacks were left very intact,” Woo justified when talking about the season where mainly the social, political and cultural context of the original work is maintained in the plots set in the past, starting with the stay of Ye Wenjie (played by Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng) in a military station with an antenna that allows contact with extraterrestrial life.
This, for the record, also has a positive side for the creative people responsible for the production. “It allowed us the opportunity to tell a very global story,” they defend, since “humanity either unites or does not unite when facing an existential threat.” In the first season of the Netflix series, it is not difficult to read the long-term extraterrestrial threat as a metaphor for how humanity acts in the face of climate change.
