CW network working on Batwoman series
- Thread starter Samurai8472
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Being gay isn't a performance and no straight person can comprehend their lives or how it's affected their lives.
I'm fine with Ruby Rose being Batwoman, I think she'll be great. Whoever is saying she's "not gay enough" is a gatekeeping asshole and is trying to shame her for being gender non-conforming and gender fluid. I'd rather have her than any straight person, cishet people should never play LGBTQ roles.
Does that mean gay people should never play straight roles?
I mean, sure, in the context of there being an issue with people not being allowed to get a foot in the door, then it's a huge problem if the roles that are literally tailor made for them are being given to other groups who have plenty of other roles to choose from. In that sense, always try to get someone whose actually part of the group in question, absolutely.
But to say a straight actor can't possibly play a gay character under any circumstances? If that's true, why the hell do we care about Hollywood at all? What actor could possibly be 'qualified' to play Henry VIII or Genghis Khan or Captain Kirk or Mister Spock? Playing something you're not truly capable of fully and completely understanding is literally what acting is. (Like how Ruby, in this case, is obviously not capable of truly comprehending what it's like to be a superhero and how that affects your life. Because superheroes don't even exist.) If you don't want to accept that, might as well stop watching anything at all.
No because there are more cishet roles by default and you’d be cutting them off from the majority of roles. This isn’t an equal situation because there aren’t many good LGBTQ roles, it’s always going to be a minority. So they should always go to LGBTQ actors because there are also less of them and it would allow them to actually tell part of their story in the performance. White people used to play other races, should we bring that back using your same logic?
As for your examples. I really don’t think you even began to grasp what I meant. Cishet people, especially white men don’t grasp being “the other”. It’s a utterly dehumanizing experience and LGBTQ have felt it their entire lives. We’ve had your “lifestyle” shoved in our faces since birth. Being a straight cis person is “normal” and until very recently we saw no proof that any other option existed except as a joke, insult or tragedy. It’s very powerful to see an actor who is like you get to play a character who is like you if you’ve didn’t grow up with it being so ubiquitous that you can’t comprehend how awful it feels to not have it. It took me until my 30s to see an actor in a role that I could recognize myself in.
Can you imagine that, seeing nothing but insulting caricatures and worst case scenarios for the kind of person you are? Every single one is either meant to make you look like a disgusting freak, an object of mockery or a life of suffering that ends in violence. That’s all you can ever be. Then when you hit 30, you see someone like you being happy and treated like with respect. Now imagine someone telling you that it’s not fair that you got the single moment because it isn’t fair to the ones who get everything already and you’re being greedy.
This is basically the same thing I said re: casting people who fit the group so as not to allow people from that group to be forced out of acting. And there are still plenty of examples of actors (both white and non-white) playing characters outside their actual ethnicity. It can be problematic depending on the circumstances. It can also not be problematic, depending on the circumstances. In an ideal world the whole thing would not need to be such a major consideration at all. That ideal world doesn't come anywhere close to existing yet, and maybe it never will, but it is, imo, the ultimate goal.
I understand that it's a huge impact in your life. In anyone's life who is dealing with those circumstances.
That does not mean that no actor could possibly play it without knowing it firsthand.
My point is: you could make the exact same objections about almost any role. Genghis Khan was shaped from childhood by the brutal society and primitive age he lived in. Hollywood actors who've never had to hunt for their own food or fight another person to death still play him. Some of them maybe better or worse then others, obviously. Ditto all the other historical figures who were produced by times and societies people in the modern age obviously can never truly sympathise with. Maybe a historian could come closer than average, but Hollywood doesn't hire historians except as consultants. And the whole point of fictional characters, obviously, is that they don't exist. And in most cases (at least relevant to science fiction and fantasy) neither do the societies, worlds or species that shaped them. Actors who cannot possibly understand their life experience find ways to embody them anyway. Because that's what acting is.
I'd say that having firsthand experience with the same situations your character faces is not absolutely required, but it does help, especially for an ongoing series lead role. In long-running series, there's usually a tendency for the actors' personalities to influence how the characters are written, so that over time they become more and more alike. For instance, early Captain Kirk was written exactly like Captain Pike, an ultra-serious, ultra-professional, brooding military man who repressed his emotions, but over time he gained more of William Shatner's swagger, charm, and humor. On the other hand, Leonard Nimoy tended to be a quiet, thoughtful, intellectual, and highly focused person in real life, so his personality and Spock's meshed perfectly.
So if you can find an actor whose real-life personality and experience are as close a fit as possible for the character, if they bring something of themselves to the role that resonates with and enhances the attributes of the character, then that's a definite advantage. That's the sort of thing you look for in casting a role in the first place. That doesn't necessarily have to mean sharing the character's ethnicity/sexuality/whatever, but if the character is inevitably going to get written more and more like the actor over time, then having the actor be a close match to the character will help maintain authenticity.
So if you can find an actor whose real-life personality and experience are as close a fit as possible for the character, if they bring something of themselves to the role that resonates with and enhances the attributes of the character, then that's a definite advantage. That's the sort of thing you look for in casting a role in the first place. That doesn't necessarily have to mean sharing the character's ethnicity/sexuality/whatever, but if the character is inevitably going to get written more and more like the actor over time, then having the actor be a close match to the character will help maintain authenticity.
I personally think it goes too far to state or insinuate that a non-LGBT actor should never play an LGBT character, but that's kind of distorting the point anyways, which is that it was the LGBT community itself - or a tiny fraction thereof, to be more accurate - that made the Batwoman casting about sexual orientation in the first place.
Yes, but it’s occuring within fandom. I don’t know how or why it should be separated. I think it’s important to talk about why the bullied are now then bullies. Why fandom feels the need to be gatekeepers and only allownib “real” fans. This has been going on for sometime and the shit that has happened to Ruby Rose is just another ugly incarnation of it. And what happened to Kelly Tran.
^ It's not a "fandom" issue because it wasn't fans of the Batwoman character telling Ruby she wasn't "lesbian enough" for the role; it was loud trolling voices from within the LGBT community who made the issue about her (Ruby Rose's) sexuality, not the character's.
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To be fair and balanced, should we fire Jim Parsons from BBT because he's LGBTQ playing straight, then?
Didn't think so.
These days being cishet is becoming "the other" by virtue of all the accusations of toxic masculinity, 5-second eye-contact rules, manhugging, mansplaining, manspreading, manbabies, etc...
Well said. No one complained when gay Robert Reed (who was not closeted) portrayed straight-as-nails patriarch of The Brady Bunch, or Zachary Quinto as another straight-as-nails character in Spock, because it did not matter. They did not need to be straight to create / represent believably straight characters. That's what being an actor is all about.
Are people angry at the portrayal Eric McCormack plays on Will and Grace? I'm genuinely asking, I haven't heard anything negative but that doesn't mean it's not there. Him being straight never seemed to be a point of contention with Sean Hayes from any interview I've ever seen.
You'd think there would be more backlash with him than Ruby Rose.
You'd think there would be more backlash with him than Ruby Rose.
Robert Reed was closeted as far as I know. I sure as hell didn't know he was gay until he died. And lest we mention George Takei? Things got super meta when they made Sulu gay in Beyond as a "tribute" only to have George say the character was never supposed to be gay. These days people have a hard time accepting that film and TV is about make believe and actors don't have to just play themselves.
Right. That's why it's called acting. Actors portray characters. in Star Trek The Next Generations holodeck adventure The Big Goodbye, Patrick Stewart was an Englishman portraying a Frenchman portraying an American. It's called acting.
Gay roles shouldn't be denied straight actors the same way that straight roles shouldn't be denied gay actors.
Yeah, you’ve completely missed the point of everything I said.
If you had read anything I posted, I said I wanted LGBTQ actors to play cishet roles too. You seem to think it’s “fair and balanced” but this isn’t equal. There are more cishet actors and roles by far than LGBTQ actors and roles. Lets say there are 100 LGBTQ actors and 1000 cishet actors. There are 100 roles available, with 95 of the characters being straight and cis. You would deny the LGBTQ actors access to the LGBTQ roles to give cishet actors “a fair chance”. I hope we never share a pizza, you’ll want the whole thing out of “fairness”.
It must be so hard for you to go with changing social norms forcing you to behave like a decent person. I have to worry that I’ll be assaulted for walking down the street or murdered after a date all while living in a country that is stripping me of my rights and trying to codify discrimination into law as a religious right. But yours is sad too.
Yeah, you’ve completely missed the point of everything I said.
If you had read anything I posted, I said I wanted LGBTQ actors to play cishet roles too. You seem to think it’s “fair and balanced” but this isn’t equal. There are more cishet actors and roles by far than LGBTQ actors and roles. Lets say there are 100 LGBTQ actors and 1000 cishet actors. There are 100 roles available, with 95 of the characters being straight and cis. You would deny the LGBTQ actors access to the LGBTQ roles to give cishet actors “a fair chance”. I hope we never share a pizza, you’ll want the whole thing out of “fairness”.
It must be so hard for you to go with changing social norms forcing you to behave like a decent person. I have to worry that I’ll be assaulted for walking down the street or murdered after a date all while living in a country that is stripping me of my rights and trying to codify discrimination into law as a religious right. But yours is sad too.
That's not what I said. At all.
You appear to be the one not reading what is being said to you.
I was trying to make my original post clearer, but I’ve guess you’ve decided to ignore that too. Thanks for wasting my time.
