Imagine being the person being told: yeah, so we only hired you to challenge beauty standards. Not because you're the best at what you do, oh no no, but because you're ugly af
The likely explanation is that the publication intentionally misrepresented what the casting director said. They were probably talking about how what they DID with her in the first season challenged beauty standards. They intentionally made her "ugly" for the story. The casting director might not have meant they hired her because she wasn't conventionally attractive, but the publication knew they could get more clicks by quoting her out of context.
Also, this thread has been kind of toxic about beauty stuff which makes me sad :(
Now, this is not Holland saying that Chalotra is ugly, or that they cast someone ugly to play the role of the most beautiful woman in the world. ... Rather, Holland is saying that she is challenging the “standard of beauty” by casting a woman with slightly darker skin.
I do understand that traditional Western fantasy is predominantly white, but I disagree fundamentally with the notion that the “standard of beauty” for most people is being white. I don’t think anyone in the entire world outside of a tiny, tiny sliver of absolute racist scumbags would look at Anya Chalotra and think anything other than “This woman is jaw-droppingly gorgeous.” Casting Chalotra may challenge our perceptions of fantasy as white (a complicated discussion on its own) but it does nothing to challenge any standard of beauty.