Stanley Tucci is pretty fine with straight actors playing gay characters
"You’re supposed to play different people... That’s the whole point of it," the Citadel actor said
Ever since the term “queerbaiting” came into the mainstream, a debate has been rolling through Hollywood: should straight actors play queer characters? While there may not be a simple answer, Stanley Tucci—who has played gay roles in The Devil Wears Prada and 2020's Supernova (not to mention Emma Stone’s father who was iconically gay once in Easy A)—recently weighed in, saying that he believes it’s perfectly acceptable as long as it’s done “the right way.”
“Obviously I believe that’s fine,” Tucci said in a recent appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs show (via Variety). “I am always very flattered when gay men come up to me and talk to me about The Devil Wears Prada or they talk about Supernova, and they say that, ‘It was just so beautiful,’ you know, ‘You did it the right way.’ Because often, it’s not done the right way.”
While Tucci didn’t elaborate on this particular form of bad-faith acting, it’s pretty easy to assume that he was referring to the myriad of films in which LGBTQ+ people have been reduced to harmful, homophobic stereotypes over the years. (A list that doesn’t really need to be included here; we’d rather take the space to plug our recent rundown of great queer cinema that you should watch.) Or perhaps he was referencing the super cool inclination of, erm, certain actors to defensively claim that the gay films they star in are not just “a gay story about these guys being gay.” Who knows!
Either way, to Tucci, “an actor is an actor is an actor.” He continued: “You’re supposed to play different people. You just are. That’s the whole point of it.”