A Case Against Playing the Other
Find out which actor is on the hot seat this week | 2 min read
If you were the casting director for a TV show, would you want someone with years of acting experience or years of lived experience?
I would probably choose the former. Acting is, after all, a performance, and good actors can contort themselves into any role.
But let’s ask the question another way. If you were casting Netflix’s biographical miniseries on the gay American fashion designer, Halston, would you cast Ewan McGregor, a household (straight male) name, or a lesser known gay actor?
No one responsible for the success of the show would turn down the star, and that’s why it’s up to the talent to change the culture of representation in Hollywood.
This is obviously not the first time a straight actor has been cast to play a gay character. Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in “The Kids are All Right,” and “Brokeback Mountain” are all cases of opting for star power over verisimilitude.
Is that so bad, though, to have the best available actor make the best art? McGregor’s response to his critics was, “If it had been a story about Halston's sexuality more, then maybe it's right that gay actors should play that role. But in this case — and I don't want to sound like I'm worming out of this, because it's something I did think a lot about — I suppose ultimately I felt like it was just one part of who he was."
Halston, the man and the character, is certainly deeper than his sexuality, and there’s no reason straight actors can’t be drawn to gay roles and vice versa, but here’s the thing. McGregor is no longer building his book. We know he can pull off Halston. He knows he can pull off Halston. So is it up to him to turn down that role and put some pressure on the producers to cast a gay actor? Absolutely.
It’s time to use 100% of the power vested in his white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered body and pull some other people up the ladder with him.
This lack of representation is not unique to sexuality, and the real problem is the ripple effect back to who even pursues acting and the cycle that proliferates in that homogeneous vacuum.
Another TV show called “In the Dark” follows Murphy, a blind twenty-something who is trying to unravel the mystery of a friend’s death and stars Perry Mattfeld, a woman with no vision issues. Though the show made an effort to audition blind actors, the pool of sighted actors was, as expected, larger and more experienced.
As Andrew Leland put it in his New York Times article about the show, “When the handful of blind roles in film and TV shows each year go almost entirely to sighted actors, most blind people grow up without any reason to expect to find a career in show business. Why would they bother?”
So those are the stakes. And when McGregor downplays the role of sexuality in his character, he’s missing the point. He had an opportunity to turn down the role and push for a replacement who might have inspired a new generation of actors and started a new cycle.
Some actors like Darren Criss and Julianne Moore, who have won major awards for playing gay characters, have publicly expressed hesitancy or ruled out playing similar roles in the future. And that’s what it’s going to take.
It’s great that more of these roles are being created, but it’s not truly progress if the diversity of the available actors doesn’t keep pace.