I don't understand this part. Why is a criminal character not allowed to be a minority?
Kumail Nanjiani made a good point about this recently, that he feels restricted to playing mostly goodhearted characters and never allowing minorities to play villains can come off (if unintentionally) as a new form of discrimination. And I agree with him. The audience should be smart enough to know one villainous character isn't meant to represent every single person of that group.
Depends on the audience, or rather, that portion of the audience that makes the most noise. Are you familiar with the recent criticism of, for example,
Wednesday? I don't think that will stick, but there were demands to replace the writers with a more diverse writing team to improve representation on the show. There is a loud minority of the internet that is constantly trying to exercise the heckler's veto on the faulty premise that any depiction of a demographic must be an implicit generalization about that demographic.
Even our featured villains will sometimes have a requisite morality (to the extent that we're invited to identify with them).
Boardwalk Empire's "Nucky" will have you killed if he can't bribe you or shake you down, but the show makes it clear that he's not racist and he is for women's rights. He may be monster, but he helps Chalky White stick it to the Klan. Moreover, we get reaction shots of Nucky looking in disbelief when his cohorts say something racist or sexist and he often challenges them with questions and quips. We want to feel good about ourselves in imagining ourselves as the villain, so we get some baddies with odd moral codes (Nucky will flat out murder you, but thank God he is for women's suffrage!).
I don't mind a villain with a moral code, but I think there's also something to be said for a baddie who is a full on baddie. That parasocial aspect, however, can be dangerous for the actor. I recall an incident in pro-wresting decades ago in which an elderly woman stabbed a "heel" wrestler in the thigh with a sewing needle as he walked toward the ring because he was the baddie. Also, we should consider that Jack Gleeson ("Joffrey") retired from acting after doing too good a job of making people hate him on
Game of Thrones.
I agree that it is a form of discrimination. Some of the best roles are the villainous ones. Who want to play a Mary Sue White Hat with no arc or complexity?
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