yeah, i would really, really like to know what actually went down and why. i mean, maybe joseph was like, "i'm not willing to do this much work for the pay you're offering," and the bbc were like, "um, we're in a budget crisis so instead of offering you slightly more money we will just find an unknown and pay him a quarter of what we would have paid you and save ourselves money *and* time." that would be entirely fair and unshady. the fact that casting then took no additional effort to find an actor of colour still sucks, but it sucks less than if someone was like, "yeah... so we're not going to risk fucking up our biggest moneymaker by hiring a black guy."