Quentin Tarantino has shared his take on straight actors playing gay roles, an opinion that will surely be added to his long list of controversial thoughts. When it comes to the acclaimed director’s opinion, he believes that good acting should be enough.
However, his take on the subject goes further than straight or gay roles. During his interview with Bill Maher for the Club Random with Bill Maher podcast, Tarantino shared his opinion on the sensitive debate about actors playing characters with a different sexual orientation. Still, he went further and weighed on ethnicity. The director made this blunt statement about authenticity as the primary objective of casting:
“I have no problem with any actor playing any type of another race role for anything that’s happened kind of up until now. Now, it’s actually, I would ask the question, ‘Well, what, you couldn’t find a Mexican to play this Mexican guy?’ And, ‘You couldn’t find an American Indian, of all the people that exist, you can’t find [one]?’ But I even feel, I don’t want to see some American do a phony French accent when there’s French people, and there’s French actors out there.”
However, when he and Maher addressed the matter of “straight actors playing gay characters,” Tarantino’s position tilted towards being able to observe an actor’s skill at portraying someone else, regardless of the character’s sexual orientation. Tarantino added:
“That’s where I would kind of draw the line. If it comes to a different race, well, that I can understand. But I also feel all the Latin America is eligible to play all the rest of Latin America. But when it comes to sexual preference, anybody should play that role. There also is an aspect about acting going on. I would be interested to see Al Pacino play a drag queen, to see the drag queen Al Pacino would come up with because he’s a great actor.”
A (Controversial) Master of the Craft of Storytelling
Quentin Tarantino’s distinct storytelling technique can’t be denied. He truly is one of Hollywood’s most important filmmakers, and most of this has to do with the narrative identity he always uses in his films, which audiences and critics have praised. You always remember watching a Tarantino film because he does things like no one else, from building unforgettable settings to unique character development.
He has brought careers back from the dead, depicted violence like no other filmmaker, and rewritten history to our convenience. However, he does have a knack for making comments that often court controversy. That could also be said of many great directors and actors, but Tarantino does tend to get more blowback than most when he puts in his two cents. While the world awaits his supposedly final masterpiece, it seems he is still keeping himself in the public eye one way or another.