The funniest and saddest (and therefore best) observation during the 2019 Oscars season was that there was more gay sex and queer characters in an 18th-century black comedy about the queen than there was in a biopic about the gay frontman of the band Queen. Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite used a period setting and a trio of female talents (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz) to thread together a knotty tale of scheming, backstabbing, and oral sex. It was bawdy and inelegant and queer as hell. It was The Crown on poppers. Meanwhile, a film celebrating the campy queer icon Freddie Mercury played it straight, narrow, and overly polished—aside from where his famous teeth were concerned.
Neither film was perfect. But like a big gay Trojan horse, those films rolled into town and a familiar conversation came pouring out: Is it right that these queer characters are all played by heterosexual actors? Well, no. But also yes. It is both a problem and not a problem, because the whole issue is thorny. In fact, it increasingly feels like the wrong question to ask; a should invites either a yes or a no response. But we are never going to reach a collective decision, because such a decision would be impossible to make.
It’s this binary way of dealing with the issue that results in Rachel Weisz likening the experience of playing queer characters to playing an alcoholic, or notorious heterosexual Matt Damon telling an interviewer, “Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality,” which sounds a hell of a lot like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Asking a bad question will always result in a bad answer. By asking whether straight men should play gay roles, we are asking a question that’s far too simplistic, removing any chance for a nuanced discussion. It forces us to decide, like a judge holding a gavel, what is permissible and to issue a collective, permanent verdict. A yes-or-no question will never get to the root of how an actor can successfully engage with queer themes. So why don’t we start asking how, instead? How can a straight actor successfully play a queer part?
A constructive appraisal of straight actors in LGBTQ roles might start by looking at the broader issue of representation: that is, behind the camera, or in the writer’s room. In the British film God’s Own Country, leading men Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu worked closely with director Francis Lee, who based the story of two farm workers falling in love on his own experiences growing up in rural Yorkshire. The actors identify as straight, but the director’s own sexuality and life experience feed into every second of the film, which forgoes expository dialogue for hungry, aggressive sex scenes and brooding pockets of silence. The actors were also put to work on Yorkshire farms, doing 12-hour days for three months. One scene, in which O’Connor’s character inspects a cow by going elbow-deep into its rectum, involved no Hollywood fakery. Elsewhere, filming was interrupted when a sheep on the farm went into labor; O’Connor assisted in the delivery.
There’s no doubt that those actors became completely enmeshed in the culture—the work and the sweat and sex and the particular way you lift the gate on the south-facing side of the field so it doesn’t swing back—because it was all specific to Lee’s experience growing up gay in a working-class farming community.
So it was with Rocketman. For his role in the Elton John biopic, Welsh actor Taron Egerton spent time with the singer, exploring John’s complex relationship with body image and understanding how a potent cocktail of emotional neglect and substance abuse facilitated his toxic relationship with his manager, John Reid. Some may find the film’s boast of being an "uncensored" look at the singer’s life paper-thin (his sex addiction is largely left to the imagination), but there’s no doubt Egerton earned praise for his portrayal of a gay man in a perpetual state of flux.
Engagement with queer themes is how heterosexual creatives further deepen their understanding of queer culture. It’s how Barry Jenkins was able to explore the specific queerness at the heart of Moonlight despite being a straight director. The 2016 film, based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is breathtakingly intimate and considered in its handling of black masculinity and queerness. Speaking to me on the phone, McCraney explains how the two worked together. “Luckily for me and Barry, he grew up not even three blocks away from me. And the great deal of what I had gone through, he'd gone through himself, even though he didn't identify as queer. He saw the bullies, he saw how people reacted. I didn't have to explain to him the brutality of a game called ‘knock down, stay down,’ because he saw it. And he knew it. I don't think there were any moments in which he needed specific help just because he wasn’t gay.”
In other words, the film was not just a queer film. Yet the queerness was a specific one also rooted in class, race, and time, all of which Jenkins understood through his own upbringing.
“We can't turn away every time someone who doesn't identify directly wants to make [a] project,” McCraney says. “We don't have such a plethora of representation that we can afford to do that at this point. If you make a movie about Mars, and you know nothing about Mars, you do the research, or find someone who does.”
Moonlight’s queerness examined a specific black masculinity, but on Netflix’s Tales of the City, a remake of the 1993 limited series, the breadth of the LGBTQ community is laid bare. Speaking to multiple identities within the LGBTQ community, rather than laser-focusing on one in particular, comes with its own set of challenges. While Olympia Dukakis returns as the trans matriarch Anna Madrigal 25 years after last playing the role, her being cisgender might not sit right with a modern audience. To address that, the show cast a trans actor, Jen Richards, to play her in flashbacks.
“I think what’s happening now—what matters so much—is that narratives around the trans community can become more sophisticated, more nuanced, because they know us,” Richards told Variety. The series' all-queer writing staff has also ensured that nuance and understanding are at the core of everything that happens on the show.
But as Pose star Billy Porter points out, there are double standards for queer actors, who have to watch while straight actors beat them to queer roles, while casting directors are often unable to perceive them as capable of playing straight parts.
“If 'flamboyantly...' wasn't in the description of the character, no one would see me ever, for anything, which wouldn't be so enraging if it went the other direction, but it doesn't," Porter said. "Straight men playing gay, everyone wants to give them an award.” The actor Darren Criss, a heterosexual who has played gay men in both Glee and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, has since said he will no longer play LGBTQ parts, because he did not want to perpetuate the problem of representation in the industry.
Criss’s decision might not have been wholly necessary, though, as there are larger issues at play; bigger names are more likely to secure funding, in theory anyway, and a dearth of out actors (no openly gay man has ever won the Best Actor Oscar) means the cycle will continue to feed itself. Cate Blanchett, while promoting Carol, defended her right to play parts that don’t correlate with her own lived experience, but admitted last year that “it was a very difficult film to get up,” despite her star power. Financiers told her that only 12-year-old boys went to see movies.
There is also the unfortunate reality that, while all this goes on, many actors see remaining in the closet—or choosing personal discretion around their sexuality—as largely beneficial; if nobody can pin down who you are outside of work, it prevents you from being seen through a very narrow lens. Richard Madden, discussing his role as John Reid in Rocketman, recently told The New York Times that his sexuality isn’t something he’s willing to discuss. “I just keep my personal life personal… I’ve never talked about my relationships.” On the one hand, it’s exciting to see pictures linking him to other men in the industry; a gay/bi man playing a gay part is progress. On the other, that ambiguity sounds an awful lot like Matt Damon’s notion of a none-of-your-damn-business utopia.
So it's no wonder then that the issue continues to rear its head, and there’s no clear answer in sight when we talk about who should play whom. Until more out actors are open with their sexuality, we won’t have progress. Until we get more films made where queerness isn’t freaking out studio heads, we won’t have progress either. Until the next film about a queer black person isn’t called “the next Moonlight,” we aren’t out of the woods.
Let’s assume then that until broader progress is made, straight men will continue to play queer roles. How they do it, and not that they do it in the first place, could make all the difference.
