Sean Penn and the gay roles debate: We are still negotiating a huge shift in identity politics

It is only fair to point out that Sean Penn did not exactly say that straight actors are no longer allowed to play gay roles.

In an interview with Maureen Dowd for the New York Times, and published by The Irish Times, he pondered his Oscar-winning performance as Harvey Milk – pioneering gay politician murdered by a disgruntled former colleague in 1978 – in Gus Van Sant’s Milk from 2008. Dowd wondered if Penn would be allowed to play that role now.

“No,” he replied. “It could not happen in a time like this. It’s a time of tremendous overreach. It’s a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.” He then “vigorously rubbed his face to show how he felt on sets”.

To be fair, Penn merely said he felt it unlikely he would be cast in this particular gay role. That did not stop a thousand wiseacres from pointing out all the straight actors who had played LGBT+ roles over the last few years. Ethan Hawke (Strange Way of Life), Josh O’Connor (God’s Own Country), Sterling K Brown (American Fiction), Nicholas Galitzine (Red, White & Royal Blue) and Paul Mescal (All of Us Strangers) have all crossed the floor.

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So, the entertainment world is utterly relaxed about such casting? We all just mutter “it’s called ‘acting’, you know” and move on? Not quite. Andrew Haigh, director of All of Us Strangers, sees the situation as more nuanced than that. Speaking to The Irish Times late last year, he pondered his decision to cast Andrew Scott, a gay actor, in the lead and Mescal, a straight actor, as the supporting romantic interest.

“I wanted the lead character to be played by someone that was gay,” he said. “That’s because there was so much within that story that I’m trying to uncover. And it made no sense to me to not cast someone who was not gay. For the supporting character of Harry, it mattered less to me. I just have to believe that there would be the correct chemistry between those people.”

All this will be most disappointing for the absolutists who feel a binary dictate must apply. Either one should never cast a straight actor in a gay role or that should never be seen as a problem. So goes the supposed conundrum. Life is, however, rarely so straightforward. It now feels better to have a gay actor play a prominent LGBT+ figure such as Harvey Milk or, recently embodied by Oscar-nominated Colman Domingo, civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin. But, yes, it is still acting, you know.

Most young performers understand the to-and-fro in these arguments. Galitzine, who played a gay rugby lad in John Butler’s 2016 Irish comedy Handsome Devil, has been frank about his unease. “I felt a sense of uncertainty sometimes about whether I’m taking up someone’s space, and perhaps guilt,” he said earlier this year. “At the same time, I see those characters as not solely their sexuality.”

We are still negotiating a huge shift in identity politics. At the time of Milk the discussion was beginning to clank into gear. Fifty years ago the question would have been seen as absurd. David Lean saw no issue in browning-up Alec Guinness for both Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India. Indeed, certain lucky actors became all-purpose “foreigners”. Yul Brynner, a Russian-American, played Thai, Egyptian, Arabian, Native American. Anthony Quinn, Mexican of Irish descent, played Arabian, Greek, Ukrainian, Italian. Anything apart from a high-level Wasp.

It seems as if few outside the disabled community thought twice about able-bodied actors imitating cerebral palsy or intellectual disability or what was then called a “hunchback”. When, however, the time came to adapt CJ Samsom’s excellent Shardlake books – concerning a sleuth lawyer in Tudor England with that last disability – the TV producers did, indeed, turn to a disabled actor. There are arguments within arguments. Arthur Hughes, who had recently performed an acclaimed Richard III for the RSC, does not have scoliosis, as we would now describe Shardlake’s condition (and that of Shakespeare’s murderous king); he was, rather, born with radial dysplasia – a shortened right arm. He nonetheless felt himself connected to the psychology. “You’re always one step ahead of what any interaction is going to be,” he told Yahoo! earlier this year. “I think every disabled person will have that.”

Nobody is being asked to burn their copies of My Left Foot or Lawrence of Arabia. The work remains sound even if we might now approach it differently. The current flexible arrangement confirms that, in one area at least, the entertainment world is growing up. That involves an acknowledgment of sensitivities hitherto ignored. It also allows the admission that, in a complicated universe – particularly as regard art – hard-and-fast, unshakeable dicta are never satisfactory. None of which will satisfy those yelling back and forth on PennGate.