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, f.
