The question of when it’s okay for straight actors to play gay roles is a complicated, constantly evolving one, especially when it comes to awards season. Many straight actors have received Academy Award nominations for playing queer characters, including sapphic fan favorite Cate Blanchett. Over the years, she’s garnered acclaim (and Best Actress nods) for portraying rich queer characters like the titular Carol from Carol, and self-described “U-Haul lesbian” Lydia Tár from last year’s Tár.
But in Blanchett’s mind, the question of who should play queer characters apparently isn’t a question at all.
“I have to listen very hard when people have an issue with it,” she told Vanity Fair in a February 13 profile. “I just don’t understand the language they’re speaking, and I need to understand it because you can’t dismiss the obsession with those labels — behind the obsession is something really important.”
In fact, Blanchett claimed, “I don’t think about my gender or my sexuality.” (Which, I have to say, is pretty easy when you’re straight and cis.)
“For me in school, it was David Bowie, it was Annie Lennox,” she added. “There’s always been that sort of gender fluidity.”
Despite playing a lesbian, like, two days ago, the actor went on to wonder if she’d be allowed to play one of her previous queer roles today.
“If [Carol] was made now, me not being gay — would I be given public permission to play the role?” she wondered. When asked if she thinks she should be, Blanchett replied: “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Another example of society’s “obsession” with labels, according to Blanchett? The backlash against Scarlett Johansson, who played a Japanese woman in the 2017 film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, and later dropped out of a project where she was set to play a transgender man amid criticisms.
“If you and I were having a conversation [25 years ago], it would be in your publication, and that was it,” Blanchett said. “Now, somehow, it’s like these opinions get published, and Scarlett Johansson doesn’t play a role that maybe she was the only person who could play.”
Oof. It’s one thing to argue that who plays a queer character shouldn’t always matter. But as Jen Richards pointed out in the documentary Disclosure, a cis actor playing a trans character doesn’t just deny rare opportunities to trans performers. It can also contribute to ongoing violence against trans people, particularly trans women.
Given the rise in anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric, it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine why the question of who should play queer and trans roles remains an important one to many LGBTQ+ viewers. Regardless of labels, it’s one that I’d argue Blanchett and her Middle Earth cheekbones should remain conscious of.
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