Joanna Lumley argues straight actors should be able to play queer roles: ‘What’s the point of acting?’
“They’re saying, ‘If you’re going to play a lesbian, you’ve got to be a lesbian,’” explained the 79-year-old actress
By Aaron Sugg
Wednesday star Joanna Lumley has argued that straight actors should be able to play queer roles, claiming the craft would become boring otherwise.
The 79-year-old Absolutely Fabulous actress made the comments in a new interview with the The i Paper, just days before the second half of Wednesday’s series two airs this week.
Joanna admitted to the publication that she had been typecast for most of her career, starting in the 1960s, admitting directors were stripping acting away from the craft.
“The world becomes boring beyond belief” – Joanna Lumley on actors being restricted to typecasting
“They’re saying, ‘If you’re going to play a lesbian, you’ve got to be a lesbian,’” Lumley explained.
She elaborated: “They’re not going to put me in as a Scottish Highland woman. Even if I could get the accent right, you wouldn’t go to me first. And also, in today’s climate, they would go to somebody who is a Scot.”
Lumley pointed to Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning role as Christy Brown, an Irishman with cerebral palsy, in the 1980s film My Left Foot, suggesting: “Maybe the film wouldn’t have been allowed to be made.”
“If we can’t act things, what’s the point of actors” – Lumley on not being able to play roles outside her typecast
This adds to the ongoing debate about whether straight actors should play gay roles, with past examples including Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada.
In an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2023, Stanley said, “I really do believe that an actor is an actor is an actor – that you’re supposed to play different people. You just are. That’s the whole point of it”.
Similarly, Lumley suggested the industry should return to the fundamentals of performance: “We’re entertainers, grasshoppers… If you can’t do that, then the world becomes boring beyond belief. If we can’t act things, what’s the point of actors?”
Lumley currently stars in Netflix’s hit Wednesday series as Hester Frump, grandmother to Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams.
Part one of series two is currently available to stream on Netflix, with the second half scheduled for release on 3 September (yes, a Wednesday).