My favorite example of this was the movie The Great Wall, which on announcement got a huge amount of controversy for putting Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe as the main characters in a Chinese movie set in historical China. The standard "Last Samurai with Tom Cruise" cries.

Then it came out the Chinese production behind it specifically sought those guys out for their movie to marvel at how awesome the Chinese were and give it Hollywood appeal (instead of being a "foreign movie"). Because they would rather two random white guys travel across all of Asia to stumble across them than let any of the lesser slant eyes in their movie.