Remember, it’s called acting for a reason
If only gay people can play gay characters, writes Celia Walden, empathy is extinct.
As a 40-something woman, I’m not technically allowed to write this column. This column’s about gay actors, you see, which makes me “ineligible,” being neither gay, nor an actor. As a 40-something-year-old privileged white woman and mother, I should really limit my observations, insights and judgments to a carefully delineated sphere of discussion encompassing pre-christmas sales, sustainable cooking oils and the rejuvenating powers of retinol — at least according to Richard E. Grant’s code of ethics.
Wading into the growing debate around the legitimacy of actors playing gay, black or disabled characters without being members of those societal groups, the Star Wars star said in an interview on Sunday: “The transgender movement and the #Metoo movement mean how can you justify heterosexual actors playing gay characters?”
Grant was so brilliant at inhabiting a gay man he received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for playing U.S. forger Lee Israel’s barfly friend Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me? So maybe it was (unnecessary) guilt talking. Or maybe Grant had worked himself up into a full virtue-signalling episode from which he later emerged blinking into the sunlight, mumbling: “But I’m playing an evil general in the new Star Wars, which means all those evil generals-turned-actors were unfairly passed over because of me.”
That’s the only logical conclusion in the increasingly bonkers argument about fictional representation, isn’t it? If only gay actors are allowed to play gay characters, only the old should play the old and only redheads (surely the most follicularly stigmatized) are allowed to play redheads, does that mean that the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch and Damian Lewis should be limited to playing members of the Eton and Harrow set (how could they possibly even pretend to understand anything else?), and Eddie Redmayne, Tom Cruise and Daniel Day-lewis should now be forced to apologize for having appropriated disabled characters in the past.
Never mind that without those names attached The Theory of Everything, Born on the Fourth of July and My Left Foot might never have been made — and the awareness of motor neurone disease, paralysis and cerebral palsy would be far less than it is now.
Or that for centuries, gay actors have played straight parts (Fleabag’s “hot priest” star Andrew Scott, for example), while gay singers sang about straight love. Let’s not look too hard at where that leaves the new fad for women playing men on stage and screen (unless the minorities, underdogs and stigmatized are allowed free rein while everyone else is imprisoned by their privileged identities?).
Grant insists the “current mood” limiting screen representation to those who fit into relevant demographics is the right one. That mood extends well beyond TV and film into other fictional worlds. Artists and musicians are increasingly being accused of appropriating the cultural forms of minority communities that aren’t theirs. Earlier this year, author Amelie Wen Zhao’s much-hyped young adult fantasy debut, Blood Heir, was pulled after the book was denounced online for being “blatantly racist” (the story was inspired by U.S. slavery, and Zhao’s not black).
Unless you “own” the same attributes as your character, painting or music — and that’s everything from gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation to political proclivities — you and your imagination are seen as not qualified to represent that community. That leaves fiction and creative art as a whole either tediously peopled by clones of the author — or dead.
Empathy, certainly, is being read its last rites. Yes, it’s the essence of great acting, writing, painting and a rich, rewarding life, but it’s also presumptuous, dangerous: off-message. As more and more of our sentences start with “As a ...” we haven’t just lost the ability to step outside our little lives and try to imagine what it might be like to inhabit another person’s situation even for a moment. We’re now meant to be proud of that inability.
By underwriting every statement and thought with our own identities, by reducing ourselves to self-appointed spokespeople for our clans — head woman, head gay, head mom, head singleton, head black man, head victim — we’ve broken down society, social media-style, into navel-gazing warring factions. We’ve opted to look at the world the wrong way through the telescope, away from all the soul-soaring, mind-broadening stuff — toward that tiny little all-important speck: me.