Out director Pedro Almodóvar defends straight actors playing gay roles

Out director Pedro Almodóvar is sharing his thoughts on Hollywood’s tendency to cast straight actors in gay roles and the fraught conversation that has surrounded the issue in recent years.

In an interview published in the September 6 edition of The Hollywood Reporter, Almodóvar defended the increasingly controversial practice.

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The actor touched on a complicated debate involving representation both onscreen and behind the scenes, as well as opportunities for LGBTQ actors.

“The essence of acting is, in fact, to pretend, to be someone other than who you are, even in your own essence,” he said. “That is at the core of acting. So, for example, absolutely a heterosexual actor can play a homosexual character and vice versa. If Hollywood is so obsessed, as it is right now, with representing minorities, be they Latinos, Asians or people with disabilities, they should actually hire them to do the writing.”

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The Academy Award-winning Spanish director’s justification is a common one, repeated by actors and filmmakers. But it ignores the reality that many out performers face in an industry that still privileges straight and cisgender actors.

In recent years, LGBTQ+ people have increasingly questioned why high profile, award-winning queer and trans roles in mainstream films have consistently gone to straight or cisgender actors, while out actors are relegated to supporting parts or struggle to find work at all. The same is true of fat and disabled performers who are passed over in favor of able-bodied actors and thinner actors willing to transform themselves with prosthetics. Most recently, Bradley Cooper, who is straight and not Jewish, has been criticized for wearing a fake nose to pay queer Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein.

Almodóvar went on to clarify that he is “very much in favor of minorities of all types to be considered for casting in films and also to be hired behind the camera and that they be able to tell their own stories.”

While Almodóvar has been hailed as an icon of queer cinema for his films featuring LGBTQ+ characters and for his over-the-top camp aesthetic, he has also consistently cast cis and straight actors to play gay and trans roles. Long before high-profile casting controversies around cis actors like Jeffrey Tambor, Scarlet Johansson, and Halle Berry taking trans roles, the director cast cis actors Carmen Maura and Toni Cantó played trans characters in his films Law of Desire (1987) and All About My Mother (1999), respectively. He cast long-time muse Antonio Banderas to play a gay director in 2019’s Pain and Glory and most recently tapped straight actors Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke to star as queer men in his highly anticipated gay Western Strange Way of Life.