I was more upset when John Galt and Hank Rearden didn't look anything like me. Haha...

Being anti-racist I don't think Ayn Rand would mind much as long as the character is true to his place and purpose in the novel. Eddie Willers is the "common man". Loyal and hard working, but doesn't put his neck out to change the world. He is a support character whose race is virtually irrelevant. Besides, if some Hollywood woke inclusiveness didn't blackwash a piece of the cast in this movie the left's bitching about everything "Randian" would reach a whole new level. Oh and "cultural appropriation" is never brought up in these cases because it doesn't fit the woke narrative to which we are all supposed to be genuflecting.

None of the characters in the book were black, which was normal for its time. The movies were set in the 21st century, when an all-white cast would have been unrealistic.

What struck me was that the only black character was Eddie, who was basically Dagny's stooge. If they could have found an unknown with the acting chops of a young Denzel Washington, he's have made a good Ellis Wyatt. And surely a couple of the bureaucrats could have been black.

Hollywood's "artistic license".

My take on this is that the physical description between the book and film is a minor issue due to the fact that this was a self-funded project. What I appreciate is that in casting, the way the actors portrayed their characters accurately, as each character evolves. I’m sure that had they been able to cast actors to multiple parts of the films. I was disappointed the first time I saw the films, (for context I didn’t start watching until Part III came out and I saw it in the theater) but after watching all 3 films multiple times I started appreciating what they had to do to tell the story.

Given Rand's commentary on aesthetics it's a wonder anyone fit her visualization of the story well enough to be cast in it (while she was still around to exercise control if she wanted it).

Casting moocher characters as the races who commonly behave that way today would have made more sense, but perhaps she felt she needed to prove she wasn't racist.

The important question is, "Who is Eddie Willers?" We might find the answer right in the first few lines of the book, where he claims that the John Galt question does not bother him, when it clearly does. He's not the person most of us think he is.

Why black? They needed a non-white character to make Rand balanced and to show that she adheres to current notions of political and racial correctness. Why Eddie? He's supposedly harmless. What if they had used Wesley Mouch instead?

I've never been pleased with the AS movies.