LOS ANGELES - Daredevil actor Peter Shinkoda alleges that his storyline in the Netflix television series, which ran between 2015 and 2018 was cut because former Marvel Television chief Jeph Loeb said "nobody cares about Asian people."
Apologizing to his fellow co-stars Tommy Walker and Geoffrey Cantor, who were also on the call, the Canadian actor said: "I'm going to take this moment … because - because I just have to."
Speaking on a #SaveDaredevil panel virtual roundtable discussion with other actors from the show, he said that Loeb's sentiment was "reiterated many times by other writers and showrunners."
The 49-year-old said Loeb, who left the company last year, cited Marvel's Blade trilogy, during which vampire hunter "Wesley Snipes kills 200 Asians each movie" and "nobody gives a (expletive)," as evidence of his belief.The original Blade trilogy was released between 1998 and 2004.
Shinkoda, who played Nobu Yoshioka, a high-ranking member of fictional supervillain organization The Hand, said the writing team had made him "privy to a story that was supposed to go".
According to the actor, Nobu's arc had been "planned for months to write and implement into shooting" but that it was ultimately "prevented".
He added that the writers "regretted it" and were "reluctant" to cut the storyline, but ultimately, "their hands were tied".
Shinkoda's Nobu wasn't the only one who lost his storyline. Loeb had allegedly also told writers not to write for Madame Gao, one of the five leading founders of the Hand.
The 76-year-old Hong Kong actress Wai Ching Ho, who played Madame Gao, also appeared in other Marvel productions, including Iron Fist (2017) and The Defenders (2017).
Shinkoda added that neither he nor Wai was invited to the show's season two premiere.
Loeb also had production credits on several Marvel TV shows, including Luke Cage (2016 - 2018), Jessica Jones (2015 - 2019), and Iron Fist (2017 - 2018). Iron Fist also saw its fair share of controversy, when the show was accused of "appropriating Asian mysticism" after casting a white man in the lead role of a narrative that heavily borrows from Asian culture.
Shinkoda also isn't the first actor to call out the Disney-owned production company. Anthony Mackie, who plays Falcon and Captain America, called on Marvel to improve on diversity both on set and on screen.
However, Shinkoda believes that the treatment of Asian characters could have gone differently if it had been written in 2020 instead of 2015.
"I think it would be approached a hell of a lot more delicately," the actor said, "Because I can see the difference. Two, three, four years difference? Huge."
