Amadeus (2025): Artistic Licence or Cultural Gaslighting?

Amadeus (2025) reignites a cultural fault line: who gets to rewrite history, and who doesn’t. Using the new miniseries as a starting point, I challenge the claim that race-swapping white historical figures is “harmless artistic licence” while similar changes elsewhere are branded as propaganda. 

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Transcript

Amadeus (2025): Artistic Licence or the New Moral Orthodoxy

[00:00:00]
 Hello, my name’s Darren, and welcome to The Maker’s Rage Podcast.

This is a more controversial one. Today I want to talk about diversity casting in film and on stage, largely in response to the 2025 TV series Amadeus, which features the English actor Will Sharpe in the role of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Sharpe’s mother is Japanese, and he is visibly of East Asian appearance, which has prompted an online debate about whether it’s justifiable to race-swap historical figures.

Now, the events depicted in the series are largely fictional. It’s adapted from the 1979 play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, which also inspired the multi–Oscar-winning 1984 film by Miloš Forman, starring a very Caucasian Tom Hulce in the role of Mozart. Shaffer’s play itself was inspired by an 1830 short play by Alexander Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri—also a work of fiction.

It can also be argued that the depiction of Antonio Salieri in both the plays, the film, and now the TV series does the real Salieri a great injustice. In the 2025 miniseries he’s played by Paul Bettany—not the most Mediterranean-looking actor, it must be said.

[00:01:00]
 So let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that we’re dealing with a work of fiction: the events are completely ahistorical, and even the characters—their personalities, motivations, rivalries—are non-biographical. Even granting all of that, is it really okay to have a real historical figure, a notable European figure like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, depicted by an Asian actor? Or a Black actor, for that matter?

Now, of course, the counterargument is familiar. For centuries, white European figures—especially in the West—have dominated culture, education, art, and the screen, while others were marginalised or excluded. From this perspective, it might seem reasonable, in a work of fiction, to reimagine a figure like Mozart with a non-white actor.

The argument goes further: Mozart’s identity is said to be “secure.” He’s a so-called dead white male, not vulnerable to erasure. Casting a non-white actor in the role of Amadeus is framed as expanding access—particularly when Mozart and Western classical music are enormously popular in East Asia.

[00:02:00]
 So what’s the harm, they ask, in having an actor of East Asian appearance depict Mozart on screen, especially if it helps young East Asian pianists or violinists identify with him? As superficial as it may sound, it is easier—especially for young people—to emulate great figures in history or fiction who look like them.

And certainly, this doesn’t seem as controversial as the BBC’s 1970s production of Othello featuring Anthony Hopkins in blackface. Othello isn’t a historical figure, but within the play he explicitly describes himself as Black—“Happily, for I am black,” he says. So casting a white actor in blackface clearly makes no sense.

Could you cast an East Asian actor as Othello? Possibly—but only by radically reworking the play, perhaps setting it among samurai warriors and removing all references to his Blackness. At that point, though, you’re no longer staging Othello; you’re staging something else.

There have, of course, been all-female casts of Hamlet, and all-Black casts of Macbeth. Hamlet and Macbeth are supposedly historical figures, though they’ve long since receded into myth and legend. By contrast, we know a great deal about Mozart’s life. He feels almost contemporary.

[00:03:00]
 Austria, like Ireland, is a small country that punches above its weight. In Ireland, we’re protective of our heroes. We insist upon their Irishness. If I were Austrian, I might wonder whether filmmakers would be equally happy to cast a Black or East Asian actor as Hitler, for example.

And then there’s the sacred dimension. We’ve all seen our share of white Jesuses. Now imagine a white Buddha. Or a white Gandhi. Or a white Martin Luther King Jr. Those who instinctively wince at that know something important: images carry history with them.

If images truly shape authority and meaning, then changing who embodies historically significant figures is never neutral. It’s always an exercise of symbolic power. Declaring some figures—dead white males like Mozart—“safe” to reconfigure, while others associated with marginalised groups are treated as protected, doesn’t remove hierarchy. It simply redraws it according to contemporary moral priorities.

In the TV series, Mozart’s antagonist Salieri—the resentful, embittered mediocrity—is played by Paul Bettany. Imagine the casting reversed: an East Asian actor as Salieri, and Mozart portrayed more accurately with blond hair and blue eyes. There would be cries of racism from the rooftops.

[00:04:00]
 So what begins as a supposed corrective to past imbalance quietly becomes a new form of selective myth-making—one that insulates itself from critique by treating disagreement as morally suspect.

You can argue that an all-white cast playing historically white European figures at the Habsburg court might limit a show’s global reach. Maybe it would. But that’s not a sound argument for distorting history. You can call it artistic licence. You can frame it as inclusivity. You can say it addresses historical imbalances in representation.

But at bottom, this is about who controls meaning.

This is a more sensitive topic than usual, so let me say this clearly: the new Amadeus is actually okay. I have a soft spot for the 1984 film, but I have nothing against the actors or filmmakers involved in the new production. I’d encourage everyone to watch it and draw their own conclusions. I’m using it here as a springboard to discuss a wider issue.

Feel free to disagree with me vehemently in the comments. And don’t forget to like and subscribe.