Playing It Straight: For Queer Roles, Should an Actor’s Sexuality Matter?

After his sexy period drama Mary & George premiered in the spring, Nicholas Galitzine decided to finally speak his truth. The London native had made a name taking on risqué queer material, playing a closeted bisexual teenager in 2020’s The Craft: Legacy before breaking out in the gay romance Red, White & Royal Blue last year. In Mary & George he advanced up the monarchy and seduced an actual king. Now Galitzine was entering his internet heartthrob era—he’d be wooing Anne Hathaway in The Idea of You shortly after Mary & George—and the time had come for him to come out, 2024-style. “I identify as a straight man, but I have been a part of some incredible queer stories,” he told British GQ.“I felt a sense of uncertainty sometimes about whether I’m taking up someone’s space, and perhaps guilt.”

The question of who gets to play what role gets trickier with every viral headline. Before social media, the topic wasn’t nearly as controversial, but over the past decade there’s been pressure on Hollywood to reckon with its dismal track record of embracing LGBTQ+ actors. In 2018 Darren Criss won an Emmy for playing a gay serial killer in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, then vowed to stop playing queer characters: “I want to make sure I won’t be another straight boy taking a gay man’s role.” This past June, Sean Penn took issue with the changing climate, telling The New York Times that he wouldn’t be allowed to play gay trailblazer Harvey Milk today, despite winning an Oscar for 2008’s Milk: “It’s a time of tremendous overreach. It’s a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.”

That’s a bit inflammatory, maybe, for a matter that’s hardly settled, even within the queer community. Neil Patrick Harris, best known for playing a straight bachelor on How I Met Your Mother, recently said, “I think there’s something sexy about casting a straight actor to play a gay role, if they’re willing to invest a lot into it.” But Billy Eichner has argued LGBTQ+ actors haven’t had the same opportunities as straight actors and urged the industry to “correct that imbalance.” And while the (relatively) elder statesmen have talked nuances, dynamic straight actors like Galitzine have broken out playing LGBTQ+ men. Even if you don’t love the idea of straight performers making their queer counterparts’ careers even more challenging, you also might not love the idea of never seeing Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn, Paul Mescal in All of Us Strangers, or Josh O’Connor in God’s Own Country and Challengers.

Male movie stardom has evolved because younger audiences are more accustomed to fluidity—and because the actors themselves are more comfortable in the liminal space between labels. It’s quite a jump after a century of utterly hetero Hollywood heroes, when coming out as gay was a career ender. Rock Hudson emerged as a matinee idol while leading a secret gay life and was only outed in the press just before he died of AIDS in 1985. Not long ago the veteran TV star Richard Chamberlain said, “I thought…being gay would be a disaster for me careerwise,” so he didn’t publicly come out until 2003, when he was 70. Matt Bomer recently claimed he was the top choice to play Superman in a blockbuster some 20 years ago and that he lost the gig after being outed.

The ugly truth, of course, is that straight actors found great success playing gay roles the whole time. Since 2002 more than 40 performers have been nominated for Oscars for portraying queer people—yet this year, Colman Domingo (Rustin) became the first out gay man ever to receive a nod for acting in that same period. That’s the imbalance Eichner was referring to. With a few exceptions proving the rule, Hollywood hasn’t made meaningful space for LGBTQ+ artists. Actors who came out long ago, like Domingo and Andrew Scott, are only now soaring after decades in the business.

For years now, I’ve been speaking with actors and activists navigating the murky territory of authentic casting, which most of them acknowledge is still a minefield. If you’re looking for a hard-and-fast rule, there’s really only one: The folks at GLAAD and other LGBTQ+ organizations have told me that cisgender actors playing transgender characters is akin to blackface and essentially forbidden. Scarlett Johansson discovered this in 2018 when she was cast as a trans man in the film Rub & Tug and had to drop out following backlash. Cis men who have played trans people, including Bomer and Eddie Redmayne, have since apologized: Now that they’re better educated on the subject, they say they wouldn’t take those roles again.

Josh O’Connor, Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, and others have been part of SUBTLE, STEAMY LGBTQ+ stories—and the solution is not to boot them OUT OF THE TENT.

Apart from that red line, people in Hollywood point out that the essence of an actor’s job is to play everything and anything outside of themselves with conviction and empathy. We’ve all seen the greats do it, and we’ve all felt their impact. I grew up watching Six Feet Under and The Wire—yes, too young—and found tremendous meaning in the performances of gay characters by their respective straight stars, Michael C. Hall and the late Michael K. Williams, as I came into my own sexuality. I wouldn’t trade those actors for anyone. As a teenager, I didn’t know they were straight, nor did I care. I’m sure that’s exactly what they preferred. Actors yearn to be mysterious. You’ve heard it many times: The less we know about them, the more they can disappear into their work. But as representation has gotten the attention it deserves, personal questions have inevitably followed.

Some established actors we have reason to think of as straight have pushed back on labels entirely. They’re defending their right to shape-shift—Daniel Day-Lewis actually can move more than just his left foot—but they’re also pointing out that none of us knows the full content of their histories and desires anyway. “While my lived experience is very far from Phil Burbank’s, that’s not to say that all of it is,” Benedict Cumberbatch once told me of playing a gay cowboy in The Power of the Dog. “But that’s where we get into the realm of my privacy.” Earlier this year I asked Tom Hollander, who played a gay trickster in The White Lotus and Truman Capote in the new season of Feud, about his own representational dilemma. “People keep asking me to do it because apparently when I play these [gay] characters, it’s believable,” he said. “My own sexuality is sufficiently liberal to have encompassed many different experiences, which are not anyone’s business.” Cate Blanchett, who’s received Oscar nominations for playing lesbian women in Carol and Tár, told me last year, “I have to really listen very hard when people have an issue with it—I just don’t understand the language they’re speaking.”

Fair enough, but young queer Hollywood remains, like the generations before it, at a distinct disadvantage. All the men in The Hollywood Reporter’s “New A-List” this year were straight and white, including Mescal and Chalamet. They’re certainly terrific actors who’ve been part of subtle, steamy LGBTQ+ stories—and the solution is not to boot them out of the tent. The solution is to celebrate their work while also confronting the fact that brash queerness remains a niche and an obstacle to leading-man-dom, and to put an end to that. Consider Rupert Everett’s provocative interview with The Guardian from more than a decade ago, in which he cited his countrymen Colin Firth and Hugh Grant. “If I’d been straight? I’d be doing what Colin and Hugh do, I suppose,” he said. Galitzine and Mescal may be freer to kiss men in films and TV shows, but Hollywood still has to contend with the suspicion that one reason it’s easier is that they’re straight.