Hollywood as always thought black representation covers all minorities and they fail on even supporting black actors and actresses. I'm still waiting for a a film with an Asian actor that doesn't need to reference his heritage or culture once.
I feel like we're getting into No True Scotsman territory now.
About 5% of the US is Asian American. That 5% includes Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Dean Cain (Superman) Dave Bautista (Drax the Destroyer), and the Rock (Luke Hobbs).
As well as John Cho, Kal Penn, Sung Kang, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Ki Hong Lee, Daniel Henney, Aziz Ansari, Daniel Dae Kim among others. In fact, there are more well known male Asian American actors than female.
So when you say you can't think of one, you're obviously not talking about the full 5%. And that's where the language barrier comes in.
Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost? Not American. George Miller and Tom Hardy? Not American. Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Colin Firth, Judi Dench, Sean Connery, Javier Bardem, Henry Cavill? You guessed it, not American.
Non-Americans have incredibly high representation in what we think of as "American cinema". Mad Max is Australian, The King's Speech is British. We just think of them as American.
But what about Memories of Murder? What about Kung Fu Hustle? What about Chungking Express? There is
tons of Asian media out there with almost all Asian actors. The Asian Box Office is bigger than the US and Asian countries dwarf the US in population. I think it is the language difference that causes us not to "count" all these movies and television... and in turn, by not counting them it makes it less likely to take actors from them and give them major roles here.
So it's a combination of No True Scotsman eliminating the most famous Asian American actors (in which case less than 5% of the US is Asian American by that standard), ignoring Asian media because of language differences while counting foreign English media as essentially American, and ignoring the high popularity of foreign English speaking actors, that exacerbates the feeling of lack of representation and infuses US media with foreign English media.
If you want something ultra specific like Asian American male born in the US and with strong "Asian" features, you're definitely going below 1% of the population.
