Jeremy Strong calls criticism of straight actors playing gay characters "absolutely valid"

You never really know what you’re gonna get with a Jeremy Strong interview. In some, he gets distracted musing over whether “the self is a discrete, fixed thing,” and he spends others shouting out his all-brown, “monastic chic” wardrobe. In his latest for Los Angeles Times, however, the Succession actor gave a well-reasoned and coherent response to an endlessly controversial subject: straight actors playing gay characters.

Strong plays notorious attorney Roy Cohn in the upcoming biopic The Apprentice, which also stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. Cohn is a tricky figure for a multitude of reasons, but not least for the fact that he was crucial to the proliferation of the Lavender Scare in the 1950s while his own relationships with men remained an open secret. He never publicly admitted to being gay and denied that he was HIV-positive, but died from AIDS-related complications in 1986. Since then, Cohn has appeared as a character in multiple pieces of LGBTQ+ media, including the 1991 play Angels In America and recent miniseries Fellow Travelers.

When asked to weigh in on whether criticisms of straight actors playing gay characters are justified or not, Strong responded that “it’s absolutely valid” before launching into a typical Strong rejoinder. “I’m sort of old fashioned, maybe, in the belief that, fundamentally, it’s [about] a person’s artistry, and that great artists, historically, have been able to, as it were, change the stamp of their nature. That’s your job as an actor,” he said. “The task, in a way, is to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat… While I don’t think that it’s necessary [for gay roles to be played by gay performers], I think that it would be good if that were given more weight.”

Strong is essentially taking the same line as Stanley Tucci did last year, when the latter said that he “believe[s] that’s fine” as long as it’s done the right way, “because often, it’s not done the right way.”

“What I do feel, whoever plays any part ever, is that you have to take these things as seriously as you take your own life, and it is not a game, and that these people and their struggles and the experiences you’re trying to render are not a plaything,” Strong continued to the L.A. Times. “If I didn’t believe that I could understand on some deep level his anguish and turmoil and his need… if I didn’t believe that I could understand it or connect to it in a way that is faithful or voracious, I wouldn’t have done it. I certainly don’t do these things just for my own self-aggrandizement.”

The Apprentice premieres October 11 in theaters.