How Do We Solve a Problem Like Andrew Garfield?
This isn’t a persuasive essay. This isn’t a take down or a hot take. This isn’t a think piece. It’s a feel piece.
The Boys in the Band was a landmark of gay theatre and gay film. The Mart Crowley play and subsequent William Friedkin film was one of the first widely seen portrayals of openly gay life on stage and on screen. The wide array of mostly white, mostly wealthy men are given the liberty to be imperfect, even cruel, while always maintaining their humanity. It explored real issues facing gay individuals and did so in a way that was nuanced and emotional. The ensemble cast was the same for the play and the film and it was mostly made up of gay men, many whom would die from AIDS-related diseases. There was one straight exception: Cliff Gorman. He was also the only member of the cast to win an Obie Award (like the Tony’s but for Off-Broadway) which he received for playing Emory, the most flamboyant of the characters.
I began with a disclaimer, because I don’t quite know how to parse out my feelings around the topic of straight actors playing gay roles. I can certainly think of several instances where it didn’t bother me at all, most recently Nick Robinson giving a wonderful lead performance in Love, Simon. But sometimes it flat out ruins a piece for me. Sometimes I feel deeply offended. I can’t defend this feeling. I can’t explain why I felt zero chemistry between Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, but tons between Jake Gylenhaal and Heath Ledger. I can’t explain why Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk felt like total posturing, but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote broke my heart. Maybe I just like some performances more than others. But this doesn’t explain the feeling in my gut of being disappointed at best and mocked at worse. It gets especially confusing when queer audiences constantly disagree about which representation feels accurate, which straight performers succeed and which fail (for example, I bet my lack of investment in Call Me By Your Name already lost half of my readers).
This is not exclusive to men. Julianne Moore and Toni Collette in The Hours painfully ruin my favorite scenes in the book and the recent revival of She’s Gotta Have It had the straightest queer women I’ve ever seen. But the key difference is straight audiences think flamboyant gay men are entertaining. They have zero interest in butch lesbians. This means that straight women often feel wrong when romantic with another woman, but they aren’t given the same opportunity to feel wrong when they’re just existing. This wrongness I’m describing is most commonly felt when I see straight actors playing (trying to play) gay men who are loud and feminine. Think Jonathan from new Queer Eye. Think Prior Walter from Angels in America.
Yesterday, I was lucky enough to see the recent revival of Angels with Andrew Garfield in the role of Prior. Sometimes with especially important works of theatre, I’ll hold out on reading them in hopes to have my first experience be on stage. I had to wait a really long time, but I’m so glad that I did. I was sitting in the fourth row and got to do parts one and two in one day and it was really an incredible way to first experience one of the great works of theatre. But I felt surprisingly little emotion. Intellectually it was one of the best theatre going experiences of my life. The play is obviously incredible. It’s so complex and nuanced I purchased a book about it in between parts so I could start reading right after. But in many ways Prior is the heart of the play. And the only thing Garfield made me feel was anger. Not at Reagan. Or society. Or Louis. At him.
I admit that I went into the play with a bit of bias. Eight years ago I loved Andrew Garfield. Between Never Let Me Go and The Social Network, he was one of my favorite young actors. I even liked him as Spider-Man. But in recent years he’s made a series of decisions and given a series of performances that turned me off. The hyper-masculine overwroughtness of Silence left me less than impressed. His decision to work with well known assaulter, racist, and anti-Semite Mel Gibson deeply offended me, as did his decision to (unsuccessfully) grovel for an Oscar playing a person with a disability in Breathe. And some may forget that before these movies Garfield played another queer character. He previously appeared as a tortured trans woman in the video for Arcade Fire’s “We Exist.”
The issue of cis actors playing trans parts is totally different from straight actors playing gay parts. When a cis man plays a trans woman it contributes to the idea that trans women are just men in drag, gay men tricking straight men into having sex with them. This can often lead to violence. At least 28 trans people were murdered last year, the majority of whom were women of color. I do not believe it is unfair to say Eddie Redmayne and Jared Leto contributed to a culture that allowed that to happen. I do feel differently when a cis woman, say Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, plays a trans woman. There are so few parts for trans actors that it seems like until producers will cast them as cis, trans characters should go to trans actors. But eventually I think I’ll feel about cis women playing trans women and cis men playing trans men the way I currently do about straight actors and gay parts. Begrudged discomfort.
But Andrew Garfield is not a cis woman. He’s a cis man. And I have to wonder what prompted this movie star to so badly want to portray a trans woman that he begged to be in a music video. To quote the video’s director, David Wilson: “Before I got on the call, I thought, Is this the right person– should we be using a transgender person? But then getting on the phone with Andrew, and Andrew’s commitment and passion for the project was just overwhelming. For an actor of that caliber to be emotionally invested in a music video is a very special thing. It just completely made sense.” It does make sense. In the video, Garfield gets to show off a range of abilities. He gets to dress up. He gets to carry himself in a feminine way. He gets to cry. He gets to feel alone. He gets to be beaten up. He gets to be inspired. He gets to perform. What actor doesn’t want to perform? Or maybe the better question is, which actors get to perform? I don’t see Andrew Rannells or Jesse Tyler Ferguson being offered Scorsese men or straight superheroes in between queer roles. As a straight man, Garfield has the privilege to jump back and forth.
In many ways, Garfield’s portrayal of Prior feels like a spiritual sequel to the Arcade Fire video. He once again gets to be feminine, he gets to be sick, he gets to be abandoned, he gets to wrestle a Goddman angel, and he gets to be sassy. It’s a dream role for any actor and Garfield clearly relishes every second he gets on stage, every moment he gets to reach far outside himself.
It all rang so, so false.
Garfield is the only openly straight actor playing a gay part in this revival. Nathan Lane plays Roy Cohn and Lee Pace plays Joe. I can’t find any information on the sexualities of Nathan Stewart-Jarret or James McCardle who play Belize and Louis, but again that’s hardly the point. It’s absurd to think we need to check who every actor is sleeping with before casting them in a role. The key is that with Stewart-Jarret and McCardle they felt like they were playing Belize, a person, and Louis, a person. Garfield felt like he was playing gay. There’s a performative quality to his flamboyance that seems to suggest choice to Garfield. The only reason Prior acts the way he does (feminine) and Joe acts the way that he does (masculine) is because Prior is putting on a show for the world. But that’s bullshit.
Neither femininity nor masculinity give legitimacy to gayness. If you’re gay, you’re gay. But there certainly are gay men who are more naturally flamboyant. I really appreciated the scene in Love, Simon between Simon and the other out gay kid at his school. Ethan, played by out gay actor, Clark Moore, didn’t have Simon’s privilege of hiding. Whether he wanted it or not his natural way of being outed him to the world. Like Prior, Ethan is feminine and often has a pithy comeback in the face of oppression. There’s no performance. That’s just Ethan. I’m sure this is how Prior Walter should feel. But for Garfield, Prior isn’t a person. Prior is an acting challenge.
The following is a portion of the play’s final monologue:
“This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”
Tony Kushner wrote this monologue for out gay actor Stephen Spinella to recite in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Much has changed since then but the message still feels needed. Donald Trump is president and surveys show LGBTQ+ acceptance has gone down for the first time in four years. Every time Andrew Garfield said the word “we” it hurt me. Us. We. We. We. I had to grip the armrests to keep me from standing up and shouting, “You are not us. You are not we.”
Next month, The Boys in the Band comes to Broadway for the first time, fifty years after it opened Off-Broadway. The revival is directed by out gay actor and director Joe Mantello who originated the role of Louis in Angels in America and the cast is filled with gay actor royalty. Robin de Jesús will play Emory. I don’t know how he’ll compare to Cliff Gorman. I’m not sure what the critics will say. I’m not sure if he’ll win an award. But I know I’ll be in the theatre watching. And I know his Emory will be a real human person. That’s all I want to see.
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