Jeremy Strong has some nuanced thoughts about heterosexual actors playing gay characters.
The “Succession” star is being both praised and excoriated on social media for his opinion that the criticism about straight actors playing gay people is “valid.” In the upcoming Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice,” Strong, who is straight, portrays a man who was gay in real life.
“Yes, it’s absolutely valid,” Strong told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “I’m sort of old fashioned, maybe, in the belief that, fundamentally, it’s [about] a person’s artistry, that great artists, historically, have been able to, as it were, change the stamp of their nature.”
“That’s your job as an actor,” he added. “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.”
Strong ― best known for his role on HBO’s “Succession” as Kendall Roy, the spiritually broken heir to a media empire fortune ― was cast last year in “The Apprentice” as the infamous right-wing political fixer Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man.
Cohn was integral to the so-called Lavender Scare of the 1950s, where Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) spearheaded a moral panic about homosexual people in government. Cohn also remained silent about the 1980s AIDS crisis, until he himself died in 1986, at age 59, from AIDS-related complications.
Strong said he has considered the complexities of the modern discourse about straight actors portraying gay people, as no publicly out gay actor has ever won an Oscar for doing so in the 96-year history of the awards. Meanwhile, there have been nine straight men who won Oscars for portraying gay people.
Strong’s remarks about equal opportunity, despite his own role as a gay man in “The Apprentice,” have caused heated discussion online.
“He’s not wrong,” wrote one social media user. “No one is saying that only gay people can play the roles, just that there should be some priority to level [the] playing field. You can’t say ‘the most talented actor should get the roles’ unless you think there are no talented gay actors.”
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“ITS CALLED ACTING FOR A REASON,” another person wrote.
Strong has had to face public criticism of his approach to acting before, when his own “Succession” co-star Brian Cox described Strong’s preference for method acting as “fucking annoying” (while also praising Strong as “talented” and “very good”).
But Strong, a classically trained actor, ultimately doesn’t seem to worry about much except his craft.
“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,” Strong told the LA Times.
“I certainly don’t do these things just for my own self-aggrandizement,” he concluded.
