Tilda Swinton says she had 'a question mark' in her mind about her Ancient One role in 'Doctor Strange'

• Tilda Swinton said she questioned her casting as the Ancient One in "Doctor Strange."
• The film was accused of whitewashing because Swinton's character was a Tibetan man in the comics.
• Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige previously told Men's Health that he regretted this choice.

Tilda Swinton told Variety in a new interview that she had "a question mark" in her mind after being cast in 2016's "Doctor Strange" as the Ancient One, a character who was originally an elderly Tibetan man in the comics.

Marvel Studios was previously accused of whitewashing for casting Swinton in the role.

The actress told Variety that originally there was "widespread welcome" to Swinton, a Scottish woman, playing this role but that the reception "shifted at a certain point, for very good reasons with which I had an enormous amount of sympathy."

Swinton appeared as the Ancient One in both "Doctor Strange" and "Avengers: Endgame."

This isn't the first time Swinton has addressed the film's whitewashing criticism. In 2016, she told IndieWire that she hoped fans would embrace her casting, saying, "There's a kind of misunderstanding, which I hope the film will make clear when people see the film."

Marvel Studios defended the casting choice at the time with a statement saying, "the Ancient One is a title that is not exclusively held by any one character, but rather a moniker passed down through time, and in this particular film the embodiment is Celtic."

Marvel chief Kevin Feige and "Doctor Strange" director Scott Derrickson both said in interviews at the time that they didn't cast an Asian man because they wanted to avoid negative stereotyping.

However, Feige more recently told Men's Health in a May interview that Marvel was wrong to cast Swinton as the Ancient One.

"It was a wake-up call to say, 'Well, wait a minute, is there any other way to figure it out? Is there any other way to both not fall into the cliché and cast an Asian actor?' And the answer to that, of course, is yes," Feige said.

In her new Variety interview, Swinton said she was "very, very grateful" that Feige spoke out about the role.

Swinton also addressed the criticism she'd faced in 2016 after she reached out to Asian American comedian Margaret Cho, whom she'd never spoken to before, asking Cho to explain the Ancient One casting controversy. Cho revealed the encounter in a podcast appearance and commented that Swinton made her feel like a "house Asian" by asking Cho to explain whitewashing and its history in media to someone Cho had never met.

Swinton said of her encounter with Cho: "I made a questionable decision to reach out to somebody in a certain way, which was naive and clearly confusing because their misunderstanding came about because of it."

She called it a "hot moment" and added, "The way in which people get listened to is by speaking up and getting hot. And sometimes, it needs to get messy."