The Take: ‘It’s time to stop casting straight actors in gay roles’
Last week, there was outrage when it was announced that straight actor Jack Whitehall is to play Disney’s first openly gay character. Here, Joe Stone says Hollywood needs to stop ignoring gay actors…
another week, another row over representation in Hollywood following reports Jack Whitehall will play the first major openly gay character in a Disney film. The straight comedian will star alongside Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in Jungle Cruise, a film based on the Walt Disney World ride of the same name.
The news came after Jack’s ex-girlfriend, BritishChinese actor Gemma Chan, joked to an interviewer that Scarlett Johansson should play her in the film of her life. Scarlett has faced fierce criticism for depicting a Japanese manga character in 2017’s big screen version of Ghost In The Shell. Last month, more accusations of appropriation forced her to withdraw from playing a trans man in forthcoming biopic Rub & Tug (a casting that inspired a thousand memes suggesting that she will take on the roles of Martin Luther King, Kim Jong-un or the entire cast of Black Panther).
So last week many drew parallels between Scarlett’s most recent controversy and Jack’s casting. ‘If Scarlett Johansson wasn’t allowed to play a trans man then
Jack Whitehall shouldn’t be allowed to play a gay man’, wrote one critic on Twitter. Others argued that, by its nature, acting involves pretending to be someone you’re not. Why shouldn’t Jack play a gay man? After all, you don’t have to be a cowboy to star in a Western?
Broadly, I agree that the job of actors is to act. While it’s inarguably inappropriate for white actors to play people of colour, I don’t believe performers should be typecast according to their sexuality. As a gay man, I would be offended by the notion that a gay actor shouldn’t be allowed to play a straight role. But there is a clear double standard. While Hugh Grant, Andrew Garfield, Rachel Weisz, Rachel Mcadams, Chloë Grace Moretz, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are just some of the straight actors who have recently starred as gay characters, the roll call of high profile gay actors playing straight parts is virtually nonexistent.
Indeed, Rupert Everett spoke earlier this year about being blacklisted from leading man roles, saying: ‘ There were three or four big films, when I was successful, that the director and other actors wanted me to be in and that I was absolutely blocked from by a studio, just for the fact of being gay.’ He’s not alone. Richard Chamberlain came out in 2003, but later admitted he ‘wouldn’t advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out’. Ellen Page has also complained that being open about her sexuality has cost her roles: ‘Now I’m gay, I can’t play a straight person?’
While gay actors Zachary Quinto and Neil Patrick Harris are successfully cast in straight roles, others fear coming out will negatively impact their career. How else do we explain the prevalence of big name closeted stars? Depressingly, their trepidation seems justified: in 2010 Newsweek devoted an entire article to arguing that gay actors could not convincingly play straight roles. Meanwhile, a 2013 survey found more than half of LGBTQ performers had been exposed to homophobic comments on set, and felt that studios struggled to market them.
With gay actors so often denied the opportunity to play straight, I can understand the frustration at them also being sidelined when it comes to gay roles. Jack is reportedly set to depict a ‘hugely effete, very camp’ character. The prospect of a straight actor resorting to lazy stereotypes is further cause for concern when the role could have been awarded to an actor whose campness has likely excluded them from other work. The performing arts aren’t a profession traditionally seen as lacking in flamboyant gay men to choose from.
It’s all compounded by the fact that LGBTQ people continue to be sorely underrepresented on screen. In addition, studios stand accused of ‘straight-washing’ characters from their source material. For example, the original comic book versions of Black Panther and
Thor: Ragnorok, both featured LGBTQ characters who disappeared during the transition to screen.
When LGBTQ stories are told, they tend to offer a sanitised version of gay life. Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name, God’s Own Country and Love, Simon (the first mainstream teen romantic comedy to feature a gay lead character, out earlier this year) all featured straight actors playing characters who are gay, but not overtly so. In fact, in Love, Simon the opening voiceover hears the protagonist promising, ‘I’m just like you. I’m normal’, as if to reassure straight audiences that they wouldn’t be exposed to anything too fruity. Call Me By Your Name screenwriter James Ivory has expressed his frustration that the final film featured no sex scenes between Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, with the camera instead panning to a shot of… loads of trees. Even then, Armie has said that he was ‘nervous’ and the role ‘scared’ him.
He needn’t have worried. When high profile straight actors play gay, more often than not they are rewarded come awards season. Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hilary Swank, Sean Penn and Jared Leto have all won Oscars for LGBTQ roles. Meanwhile, no openly gay or lesbian actor has ever won Best Actor.
I agree that it shouldn’t matter that Disney has cast a straight actor in its first major gay role, just as it shouldn’t be an issue for LGBTQ performers to play straight or cisgender parts. But this isn’t a level playing field and giving this landmark role to a gay actor would have gone some way to redressing the huge imbalances that persist. Who knows – it could even have helped create a gay star bankable enough that execs wouldn’t flinch when it came to casting them in straight parts. As it stands, it doesn’t feel much like progress.
IT SHOULDN’T MATTER… BUT THIS ISN’T A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD