Joel supports gay students
HOLLYWOOD actor and director Joel Edgerton has applauded Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s move to close existing exemptions for religious schools to anti- discrimination laws that let students be kicked out because they are gay.
“I hope that he does and he should abolish that kind of freedom act,” the 44- year- old actor said.
It comes as Mr Morrison said parliament could within the next two weeks remove the power of faith- based schools to discriminate against children on the basis of their sexuality.
The filmmaker returned home to Australia this week to promote the upcoming release of his controversial film, Boy Erased. It’s a true story about a young American man whose parents sent him to a gay conversion therapy program to cure him of his homosexuality.
“The ability to hide behind belief in order to diminish any person’s freedoms is diabolical,” Edgerton said.
“I am amazed by the backward thinking. I am amazed by the pushing of the idea that homosexuality is a choice.
“I just find it so ridiculous. If I am at school and I burn down the gym, I can understand if you expel me.
“How can you be persecuted though over something you have zero control over?”
Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley’s book of the same name. Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe play parents Nancy and Marshall Eamons while Lucas Hedges is their son, Jared.
As well as directing, Edgerton plays Victor Sykes, the lead therapist of the conversion therapy program.
“You make a movie like this or you tell a story like this and there is just a bunch of people willingly waiting because they already believe that it is absurd,” he said.
“How do we get the other side of people to watch it?
“How do we get politicians to endure in their minds a screening of this to understand that we are not painting re- ligion in a bad way, that we are not demonising anybody?”
Edgerton, whose other film credits include The Great Gatsby, Loving and Red Sparrow, continued: “I want this to be a conversation on a couple of different fronts.
“When I was going into making the movie it was going to be an identifier for young people and coming out of it I think that is still true but it also feels like it is even more for parents, the decision makers.”
Edgerton admitted having Academy Award winning actors Kidman and Crowe on board would help get the film noticed.
“I knew it was really going to help if we could cast movie stars,” he said.
“Because if Nicole stands behind this subject and Russell stands behind this subject and they loved Russell in Gladiator and Nicole in her movies or whatever, then maybe they will walk into the cinema when they might not have.
“Knowing it was them or any other movie stars I knew I could use casting as a lure.”