Jeremy Strong recently told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s absolutely valid” to criticize straight actors for playing gay characters, although he also strongly believes that it’s an actor’s job “to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat.”
via: EW
For straight actors, playing queer has often led to plaudits and accolades that elude out actors tackling queer roles.
Though there are now more out actors, some, like Colman Domingo, who garner Oscar nominations and the like for playing queer, the debate rages on over whether straight actors should continue to be rewarded for playing queer, especially when out actors have yet to receive similar praise.
The latest heterosexual thespian to weigh in on the issue is Jeremy Strong, who plays lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi's Donald Trump biopic starring Sebastian Stan as the future 45th President, when he was just a sleazy real estate mogul in New York.
Cohn, the mastermind of the Lavender Scare, which ousted gay and lesbian employees from federal jobs in the ’50s, and himself a closeted homosexual, was Trump's mentor. Cohn, later disbarred for trying to steal a dying man's fortune, was called "the polestar of human evil" by the Bad Gays podcast, "about evil and complicated queers in history."
While the role is sure to gain Strong awards heat, he's aware that he's also playing a bit with fire. When asked if there was any merit to the criticism of straights playing gay, he was quick to agree.
“Yes, it’s absolutely valid,” Strong told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Monday. “I’m sort of old fashioned, maybe, in the belief that, fundamentally, it’s [about] a person’s artistry, and that great artists, historically, have been able to, as it were, change the stamp of their nature. That’s your job as an actor. The task, in a way, is to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat.... While I don’t think that it’s necessary [for gay roles to be played by gay performers], I think that it would be good if that were given more weight.”
Cohn, as the LA Times points out, has been the subject of more fictional portrayals than gay hero Harvey Milk, though Sean Penn won his second Oscar for playing Milk in 2009. Al Pacino won an Emmy for portraying Cohn in HBO's adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, while just recently Will Brill played Cohn in the miniseries Fellow Travelers.
“What I do feel, whoever plays any part ever, is that you have to take these things as seriously as you take your own life, and it is not a game, and that these people and their struggles and the experiences you’re trying to render are not a plaything,” the notoriously intense Strong added. “If I didn’t believe that I could understand on some deep level his anguish and turmoil and his need, and the sort of Gordian knot that every character has but Roy has particularly — if I didn’t believe that I could understand it or connect to it in a way that is faithful or voracious, I wouldn’t have done it. I certainly don’t do these things just for my own self-aggrandizement.”
Still, if Strong is nominated and wins an Oscar for playing a villainous gay, the question remains: Should Cohn have been portrayed by an openly queer actor in the first place, or is the performance all that matters in the end?
Until a queer actor actually wins an Oscar for playing queer, we may never know.
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