Tom Slater Tom Slater

Why should we care whether an actor is gay?

Screenwriter Russell T. Davies (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

In this woke age, we seem to have incredibly short memories. We feel the need to damn people today for holding views that were completely acceptable yesterday. But the memory of Russell T. Davies, the acclaimed British screenwriter, seems to be particularly short.

In an interview for the Radio Times — promoting his new Channel 4 series, It’s A Sin, about young gay men in 1980s London — Davies has criticised the practice of giving gay roles to straight actors. ‘I’m not being woke about this’, he said. ‘It’s about authenticity, the taste of 2020. You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t black someone up.’

That Davies was himself casting straight actors in gay roles as recently as 2018 apparently doesn’t blunt the critique. Hugh Grant played Jeremy Thorpe in Davies’s recent television drama, A Very English Scandal. He cast straight actors in his landmark 1999 series Queer as Folk.

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in