The Multicultural Mysteries of Vin Diesel

Perhaps the first thing you notice about Vin Diesel is the bald head -- a great, shiny expanse that seems to go on forever. Like much else about the star of XXX, Diesel's head seems both larger than life and mysterious -- he keeps it shaved so cleanly that no one knows exactly how much hair he might have. No one knows what kind of hair he has, either -- kinky, straight as a stick, wispy fine? And minus that clue, it's hard to tell what ethnicity he might be -- which is just how Vin Diesel wants it.

It's only natural that this summer's breakout International Man of Mystery have a few secrets of his own. If Diesel had his druthers, the public wouldn't know anything about him, not even his real name (Mark Vincent). And they certainly wouldn't know his ethnic background, although speculation runs wild in magazines and on-line message boards, with most guesses tagging him as Italian and African-American.

Diesel has preferred to call himself "multicultural" for the most part or perhaps "Italian and a lot of other things," as in a Bet.com profile. "There's something cool about this kind of ambiguous, chameleon-like ethnicity," he told the website's reporter. That quality has allowed him to play a range of ethnicities -- from Italian American (Adrian Caparzo in Saving Private Ryan), to black (Richard Riddick in Pitch Black), to ethnically indeterminate (Chris Varick in Boiler Room and Xander Cage in XXX).

Along with The Rock -- a Samoan/African-American professional wrestler turned action movie star -- Diesel is being marketed as Hollywood's new superhero: a self-made man unconfined by racial categories. He seems to agree with the assessment.

"A man of color is being exposed to so many different opportunities," he told Bet.com, "Hopefully, it says something about my acting." But does Diesel's optimism about breaking through Hollywood's color barriers hold true for anyone but Diesel? And is his refusal to reveal his ethnic background tearing down outdated racial categories or merely putting him in the color closet?

Diesel isn't the first multicultural actor on the scene. Lou Diamond Phillips played a whole gamut of ethnicities: from Native American and Latino to Thai and Middle Eastern. Of Scottish, Irish, Cherokee, Filipino, Hawaiian, Chinese, and Spanish background, Phillips had the sort of versatile looks that got him plenty of work on the screen and stage.

Most biracial or multicultural actors don't have the luxury of playing so many different parts, however. Many play to one part of their background almost exclusively -- and the breakdown of roles and actors says much about how conceptions of race are configured in the United States.

In what seems to be Hollywood's version of the one-drop rule, the majority of multicultural actors who are part African-American play African-American characters, not biracial, white, or characters of different ethnicities. Halle Berry, Lisa Bonet and Shemar Moore, among many others, play African-American characters almost exclusively, although their heritage is multiracial. But the one-drop rule alone doesn't explain the casting -- these actors themselves often identify as black, not multiracial. In Berry's case, she has told numerous interviewers, her mother raised her to think of herself as black, because that is the way the world would see her.

Aside from a few exceptions like Kelly Hu and Lindsey Price, actors who are white and Asian, however, often wind up playing to their white background. Jennifer and Meg Tilly, Keanu Reeves and Kristin Kreuk, among others, play white characters -- and few seem to know about their non-white background. The same often applies for actors who are white and Latino, like Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Lynda Carter and Madeleine Stowe. Raquel Welch (Bolivian and white, according to mixedfolks.com) had passed for white for over 40 years in show business -- and she only recently came out as a Latina, not a biracial woman.