Angela
Elite member
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
I always thought Armand Assante (irish-italian) looks extremely spanish, but actually I don't know really why I'm thinking this. I could be wrong.
He played a Cuban rather convincingly, I thought, in a movie I very much liked, but then there are a few Cubans who, perhaps because of the various sources of European immigration to the island, give me an Italian, or more precisely, a Sicilian vibe, but overall the whole nose area on Assante just doesn't look that Iberian to me. I suppose the way I see it is that there are people who, because they are southern European, can "fit" in either the Iberian peninsula or Italy. Others, because of certain distinctive traits, "fit" better in one or the other. That's sort of the point of my thread...these things are fluid, ancient common ancestry plays a part, there is overlap, especially between neighboring countries, and also chance recombination has a part to play, and so you can get some very unexpected results as well. You just can't put people into these boxes and make these dogmatic statements.
Assante played Napoleon as well, who was a Corsican of Tuscan and Ligurian descent, and I thought it was decent casting. A lot of these Irish/Italian mixes are Irish/Southern Italan or Irish/Sicilian mixes, and to me, they can wind up looking rather northern Italian. It's born out on the genetics side too, although I'm fully aware that the alleles measured for ancestry are "junk DNA" and I don't think they include the few percentage points of the genome that code for "appearance". Anyway, I saw many mixes on 23andme of Sicilians with Brits who came out Northern Italian or Tuscan. It's just that no one, particularly in the U.S., seems able to recognize the kind of looks that can be found in northern Italy and Tuscany.
Oh, to go back to Cubans for a minute. The handsome Andy Garcia plays Italians often, and it's not jarring, although I wouldn't ever guess him as Italian if I didn't know his background. . This Cuban, on the other hand, fooled me. I thought he was Sicilian when I first saw him.
Here's another Italian/Irish actor...Nicholas Cage. I don't think he looks Iberian either.