Ben Whishaw and Alan Cumming lead cast of new BBC series ‘Queers’
By Will Stroude
Ben Whishaw and Alan Cumming lead the cast of a new BBC series coming to TV screens this summer.
The pair will appear along with Rebecca Front, Russell Tovey, Gemma Whelan, Ian Gelder, Kadiff Kirwan and Fionn Whitehead, in BBC Four’s Queers, a series of eight 15-minute monologues designed to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales.
Curated by Sherlock star Mark Gatiss and broadcast as part of the BBC’s Gay Britannia season, each episode will explore a different aspect of gay life in Britain throughout the 20th and early 21st century.
London Spy star Whishaw will appear in ‘The Man on the Platform’ as a love-lorn soldier returning from the trenches of the First World War, whilst a hundred years later, Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) reflects on the dawn of equal marriage in ‘Something Borrowed’.
‘More Anger’ finds Russell Tovey (Looking, Being Human) playing a gay actor in the 1980s, while Rebecca Front (Humans) contemplates her very particular marriage in ‘Missing Alice’.
Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones), Kadiff Kirwan (Black Mirror), Ian Gelder (Game of Thrones) and Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk) appear respectively in ‘A Perfect Gentleman’, ‘Safest Spot in Town’, ‘I Miss the War’ and ‘A Grand Day Out’,
Each episode of Queers will be staged live at The Old Vic in London throughout July, before being televised on BBC Four that same month. Casting announcements for the stage version are yet to be made.
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