Suranne Jones: I was target of criticism for lesbian role
STRAIGHT actors are singled out for criticism when playing LGBT roles despite being “just the face of the project”, the actress Suranne Jones has said.
Jones, who plays lesbian diarist Anne Lister in the BBC drama Gentleman Jack, said the controversy about portraying a different sexuality on screen would not be as great if people thought “more intelligently”.
Saying actors were the target of complaints about LGBT representation, she argued that, if the entire staff on a project, including directors and writers, were considered, controversy would fade away.
The actress plays the 18th-century figure Lister, who wore male dress and created a coded diary of her life, including her conquests of women.
Jones told Radio Times: “Actors are just the face of a project. On this job, there were a lot of gay, lesbian and straight people giving their input, and I think people forget that when they point the finger at actors and say that only straight actors should play straight parts. No one ever points the finger at directors and writers, which I find odd. I think that’s because we’re the face.
“If people thought about it a little more intelligently, the question wouldn’t come up so much.”
Jones said her character was a fascinating subject, who just happened to be a lesbian. The show’s sex scenes, she said, avoided being gratuitous.
Sally Wainwright, the writer, added: “The thing I probably love most of all about Anne Lister is that she never felt sorry for herself.
“In a world that could easily have had no place for her because she was conspicuously a “masculine oddity” (the word lesbian wasn’t used then), she refused to be invisible, she refused to conform and she refused to be downhearted.”
The full interviews can be read in Radio Times, out today.