cookiegirl

Today has been a day filled with frustration, and disbelief that this is 2012 and we are still having to deal with this insanity.

This afternoon I read leonie_alastair's post alerting me to Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter tirade on why Matt Bomer is too gay to be cast in Fifty Shades of Grey. You can read his tweets on his Twitter page, or read the reports on the controversy at Huffington Post, The Hollywood Gossip or BuzzFocus (warnings for homophobia or references to homophobia on all the above).

Now, whilst I personally think Fifty Shades is an appallingly written book, I do think the film may turn out to be quite good in the right hands, and I think Matt would make an amazing Christian. Is that the point? No. The point is that no actor should be discriminated against based on their private life. If we allow actors' romantic lives to determine what roles they can and can't play, we are sentencing actors and actresses who are concerned about their careers to a lifetime in the closet.

There's also a serious double standard going on here. Nobody raises an eyebrow when a straight man is cast in a gay role. Nobody said that Heath Ledger was unrealistic in Brokeback Mountain because in real life he didn't really sleep with men. Sean Penn played a gay man in Milk, won an Oscar, and was praised for his daring, despite having had two high-profile marriages to women. And yet today Ellis stated that Matt playing Christian would be 'ludicrous', that the resulting press tour would be 'an embarrassing fiasco' and that what was needed was 'an intensely straight actor wanting absolutely to screw Ana Steele'. This makes so little sense that my mind boggles. How do we know any actor is 'intensely straight'? How do we know, even if the chosen actor is straight, that he will be attracted to the actress playing Ana, or that he will enjoy the BDSM lifestyle? We don't. We don't need to. That's why it's called acting. Christian, not the actor playing him, is the one that needs to want to 'screw Ana'.

I knew better than to hope that this opinion was limited to Ellis - I had already seen glimpses of it in Youtube comments - but I was pretty appalled to see that it was also relatively prevalent in the comments on the articles which report Ellis' tweets. People commenting they would be unable to believe him in the role because they know he's sleeping with a man, people commenting that he would be unable to construct any onscreen chemistry with a woman... it's enough to make me despair. 

Matt is an excellent actor who plays a convincing straight man on White Collar and has led millions of women to fall for Neal Caffrey. If he wants the role, he deserves the chance to be considered, just like any other actor. We should not be pigeonholing actors as only able to play gay or straight roles, any more than we should stop married actors from playing single roles. 

I realise that on Livejournal, I'm almost certainly preaching to the choir, but I felt the need to get this out anyway.