[Shasta Beast]

Originally Posted by blankall

I'm guessing they purposely avoided an Asian looking actor. It's hard to pull off a live action version of a character like Mandarin without it being super racist. I'm guessing the studio wanted to distance themselves as far as possible from early comic depictions of Mandarin.

From EW:

Kingsley is not, of course, Chinese, but [Marvel chief Kevin] Feige says they wanted to blur the background of this version of The Mandarin. “It’s less about his specific ethnicity than the symbolism of various cultures and iconography that he perverts for his own end,” Feige says. From his samurai hair, to his royal robe, to his bin Laden-esque beard, and the AK-47 he keeps at his side, Kingsley’s interpretation is a hodgepodge of various warrior motifs.

“Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher,” The Mandarin snarled in footage from the movie previewed last July at Comic-Con. (Expect to hear a similar monologue in the Iron Man 3 trailer coming out tomorrow.) “Lesson #1: Heroes – there is no such thing.” That little speech played out over footage of The Mandarin’s black helicopters launching missiles into the seaside home that is Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man headquarters. As the structure detonates and collapses into the sea, all of his armor and equipment sinks with it. In the comic books, The Mandarin was a Chinese exile who ventures into a remote, forbidden valley and discovers a crashed alien spaceship. Inside the ship are ten rings, each with a different power, which allow him to seek revenge on a world he considers unjust. But this version of The Mandarin will not follow that same backstory, said Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios. Iron Man 3 will be more about a clash of technology, Feige says and those who have been paying close attention to the previous two films know that The Ten Rings is a term for the terrorist group that kidnapped Tony Stark in the first movie, and gave the villain Whiplash some assistance in the sequel. In that way, The Mandarin (who for a time was going to be the main villain in the first film) has been a part of the Iron Man series from the beginning, albeit as the off-screen manipulator.