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Sean Penn Fact-Checked After Lamenting That Straight Actors Can't Play Gay Roles Anymore
Sean Penn is under fire after complaining about the preference in Hollywood nowadays for LGBTQ roles to be played by LGBTQ actors.
Penn, who won a Best Actor Oscar in 2009 for playing gay rights icon Harvey Milk in the biopic Milk, called the practice of hiring queer actors over straight ones "timid and artless" in a recent New York Times interview.
Penn claimed that a performance like his in Milk could not happen today because of the "tremendous overreach" in Hollywood when it comes to approaching such matters.
There's just one problem: It's not true.
As X user Ryan Aguirre pointed out in response to Penn's comments:
"Nicholas Galitzine, Paul Mescal, Ethan Hawke, Josh O’Connor, and Sterling K. Brown are all straight men who played gay characters in literally *the past year* what in the actual h*ll is he talking about."
He's absolutely right—and in Brown's case, he even nabbed his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role of Clifford Ellison, the gay brother of the main character in last year's American Fiction.
Even more recently, Galitzine has very publicly spoken about his misgivings about playing several queer characters as a straight actor.
What in the actual h*ll, indeed, Mr. Penn.
In the Times article, Penn seems very attached to Milk. He told writer Maureen Dowd:
“I went 15 years miserable on sets. ‘Milk’ was the last time I had a good time.”
The film, a biopic about Milk's rise to becoming the first openly gay man to be elected to public office before being assassinated in 1978, came on the heels of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California and ushered in a wave of homophobic divisiveness nationwide.
Penn was lauded for taking on the role despite the potential at the time for damage to his career, and the film and his performance were considered by many as a landmark for progressive support of the LGBTQ community.
But times have changed, and Penn seems fairly mad about it. He told Dowd:
"['Milk'] 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 stopped short of devolving into right-wing talking points about "woke" culture, but you can hear it in the subtext.
As Aguirre pointed out, he's flat-out wrong—and the several examples Aguirre highlighted aren't even an exhaustive list; several pointed out Barry Keoghan's now legendary performance as a gay (or at least bi) man Olive Quick in last year's Saltburn.
And it led to quite a few people slamming Penn for what they saw as a comment that was somehow simultaneously self-pitying and self-aggrandizing.
We wish Penn a speedy recovery from his hurt feelings that gay roles sometimes go to gay actors now.