‘Individuals raised hell’: why shouldn’t Scarlett Johansson and James Franco play queer characters? | Motion pictures

Justin Kelly and I first met in 2008 once I was despatched to Los Angeles to interview Gus Van Sant. I breezed into the screening room the place Van Sant was viewing a tough lower of his movie Milk, and promptly tripped over the film-maker’s Australian shepherd Milo, who was snoozing at midnight. Kelly was minding the canine that morning, so in some small however unshakable method I’ll at all times blame him for my spectacular stumble.

Kelly was the editorial assistant on Milk, which starred Sean Penn because the assassinated San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, and James Franco as his lover. Kelly then went on to direct Franco on two events as homosexual characters based mostly on actual folks: activist Michael Glatze, who renounces his former life after discovering faith in I Am Michael; and the escort, porn producer and convicted assassin Joe Kerekes in King Cobra. Consequently, Kelly has had a ringside seat for the entire “queerbait” argument over whether or not straight or apparently straight actors ought to play LGBTQ+ roles.

“I by no means noticed James’s performances as him ‘pretending’ to be homosexual,” he tells me from among the many jaunty cushions in his mom’s visitor bed room in Prescott, Arizona, the place he has stopped off throughout a highway journey. “I simply noticed him as being fascinated with enjoying every kind of characters. He knew he might assist these cool queer motion pictures get made and provides somebody like me an opportunity to direct. After we had been doing press, journalists would throw him some shade, and I’d be like, ‘He’s bringing these unbelievable queer tales to the display, so what’s the issue?’”

The time period “queerbaiting” wasn’t in circulation once I Am Michael opened in 2015. “As soon as it began floating round, I grew to become very irritated by it,” Kelly says. “I believe it’s fucking bullshit. Since earlier than Stonewall, homosexual folks have been asking the straight world to just accept us and never deal with us in another way. And now we lastly have these enormous names – actors, musicians – telling the world that not solely do you have to not be homophobic however that perhaps it’s fucking cool to be homosexual … and individuals are mad? I’m like, ‘What’s improper with you?’” He’s laughing and spluttering. “That’s what we’ve been asking for all this time!”

Such complaints could also be guided partly by the misapprehension that work is being snatched away from LGBTQ+ expertise. “Dare I veer right into a controversial instance?” asks Kelly. “Scarlett Johansson was going to play a trans character, then folks raised hell, so she dropped out.” He’s referring to the nonetheless unmade Rub & Tug, for which Johansson was forged because the real-life trans male gangster Dante “Tex” Gill, earlier than she stepped down from the movie in 2018. “It might have been an excellent story to get on the market. Who is aware of how many individuals it could have impressed? But it surely fell aside. And now that film is gone. I believe queer folks ought to really feel bummed about that. I imply, think about ScarJo on the Oscars for taking part in a trans man: that will’ve been main. The essential factor to recollect is – guess what? – well-known actors get indie queer movies financed. And we want visibility.”

After twice working with Franco, who spent greater than a decade teasing the world that he could be homosexual, Kelly directed Kristen Stewart in JT LeRoy, a couple of infamous real-life literary hoax. Till Stewart got here alongside – and got here out – no different trendy performer of comparable calibre and standing had expressed queer sexuality so emphatically via their decisions of roles. In JT LeRoy, she stars as Savannah Knoop, a non-binary artist who agreed to pose because the (male) writer of a brace of queer novels that had been the truth is the work of Knoop’s older sister-in-law.

Stewart has additionally been revelatory as a diffident night-school instructor pined over by a timid pupil in Kelly Reichardt’s Sure Girls, and as a queer, steroid-pushing gymnasium boss in Rose Glass’s lurid B-movie-style romp Love Lies Bleeding. A lot of the frisson in her two movies with Olivier Assayas – Clouds of Sils Maria and Private Shopper – derives from the impact of her being not fairly tangible, or simply out of attain. In each, Stewart is a peripheral or ephemeral determine: a curious place for one of many world’s most photographed faces. Private Shopper, JT LeRoy and Spencer, through which she performs Princess Diana, all present Stewart with fastidious scenes of dressing and undressing that trace on the divestiture or cultivation of layers, defences and secrets and techniques. The sense is that the actor is exposing some unseen inside dimension, expressing her personal queerness via a sequence of masks.

Attaching Stewart to JT LeRoy was nothing in need of a coup. She got here out publicly on Saturday Evening Reside in 2017, being greeted with cheers after describing herself as “like, so homosexual”. Kelly had met her just a few years earlier to debate the script, which he and Knoop tailored from Knoop’s e book Lady Boy Lady: How I Turned JT LeRoy. “Kristen made it clear that she’d introduced her girlfriend along with her,” he says, “and I keep in mind considering, ‘Ooh, I do know she’s homosexual and nobody else does!’”

It took a number of years to safe financing. So why did Stewart dangle on? “She was very related to the fabric. I introduced it up one time once we had been capturing in Winnipeg. We’d go to this small-town homosexual bar the place everybody would stare and ship over drinks. I instructed Kristen, ‘A part of me was questioning in case you had been gonna get 5,000 different nice provides and bail.’ And she or he mentioned, ‘I might have achieved this film at any level. I used to be afraid it’d by no means occur as a result of it’s such a cool story that it might have been too cool for folks to place cash into, or to grasp.’”

The timing couldn’t have been higher. “Since she wasn’t formally out when she signed up, she jumped on the alternative to play Sav, who was not only a lesbian however a queer girl who now identifies as non-binary – however at the moment didn’t. There are already non-binary elements to the character within the film, although, in all of the going back-and-forth between being a boy and a lady.”

Stewart labored carefully with Knoop. “Kristen and Sav actually hit it off. Sav’s a real artist: their complete fashion, their clothes. They put on the weirdest shit, it’s fucking unbelievable. Kristen was so into them as an individual. One of many issues she introduced, I believe, got here from not being out at that time. Sav, the character, was pretending to be JT whereas additionally within the closet about being doubtlessly trans and doubtlessly non-binary, and never figuring out how you can put that out into the world. And Kristen was going via the same factor: at that degree of fame, you’re doubtlessly gonna get attacked or ostracised for popping out. That concept of hiding a part of one’s id was one thing she wove into the character so superbly in these very quiet methods. You possibly can see in quite a lot of her roles that she’s coping with id. As Princess Diana, she’s making an attempt to determine who she is as somebody who doesn’t need to be that well-known.”

Her efficiency in Love Lies Bleeding, although, is the one which Kelly maintains is the closest to the Kristen Stewart he is aware of. “In JT LeRoy, she was enjoying somebody so totally different from herself, despite the fact that there was that connection of each having a secret. Whereas I noticed extra of Kristen in Love Lies Bleeding, extra of the true individual by way of being a badass bitch. I believe it was an opportunity for her to take action many issues she’s at all times needed to do. To play a model of herself and to be super-fucking-gay. To have these intercourse scenes, the stuff about fingering, the ‘I wanna unfold you’ line, licking the protein shake that spills on her girlfriend’s physique, taking males down. All issues that I imagine she was dying to place on the market.”

Checked out from this distance, I Am Michael and JT LeRoy play like cracked mirror pictures of one another. Each are impressed by real-life id crises and capitalise on the actors’ off-screen baggage. Simply as Stewart’s expertise of being within the highlight whereas hiding elements of herself knowledgeable JT LeRoy, so Franco’s teasing about his personal sexuality enhanced I Am Michael, a movie that hinges on the sincerity or in any other case of his character’s conversion. A previously homosexual man making an attempt to persuade the world he’s now straight was being performed by a straight actor who had lengthy hinted that he could be homosexual.

“I don’t suppose I used to be acutely aware of it on the time,” says Kelly. “However now you convey it up, it most likely did assist. We’re watching this man query his sexuality. It may additionally have helped him play the character as nicely. I don’t know whether or not James is homosexual or not.” He smiles. “I imply, everybody’s slightly bit homosexual, so …”