"I'm
not a lesbian, but I play one on TV."
This
is a phrase more likely to be used these days, as casting for
lesbian roles in TV and film appears to be much easier today
than it was even a few years ago. The increasing success of
movies and TV shows with lesbian characters has diminished the
stigma of playing a lesbian character to such a degree that
directors who once couldn't convince well-known actresses to
even look at lesbian roles are now turning them away in droves.
Besides
the recent sapphic roles played by Salma Hayek (Frida),
Charlize Theron (Monster),
Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry),
Gina Gershon and Lori Petty (Prey
for Rock 'n Roll), Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale
(Laurel Canyon),
and Meryl Streep and Allison Janney (The
Hours), we will soon see lesbian or bisexual women
in upcoming movies played by Heather Graham and Saffron
Burrows (Gray Matters),
Monica Belluci and Ling Bai (She Hate Me), and Kelly
Preston and Famke Janssen (Eulogy)--while
everyone from Brittany Murphy to Renee Zellweger to Pink vies
to star in the upcoming Janis Joplin biopic.
In
the last year on television, well-known actresses like Jennifer
Beals, Rosanna Arquette, Lolita Davidovitch, and Kelly Lynch
have all played lesbians on The L Word, and next season
is likely to see even more familiar faces guest-starring on
the series.
But
it wasn't always this easy--as recently as 1998, directors
looking to cast lesbian or bisexual roles still frequently encountered
resistance from actresses to playing gay, as writer-director
Maria Maggenti (Without a Trace, The
Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love) discovered
when she was first casting her bisexual-triangle film Us,
Them and Me five years ago.
"There
were several actresses trying out for the film," Maggenti
said in a May 2004 interview,
"who were concerned about kissing another woman."
Director
Jamie Babbit ran up against a similar problem when casting the
lead role in But I'm a Cheerleader (a role which eventually
went to Natasha Lyonne). "My first choice rejected me on
the basis of being too Christian," Babbit admits in a recent
interview
with AfterEllen.com. "Although she cried when she told
me she couldn’t do it, and she was clearly very torn,
she just couldn’t have her family see her face on this
poster."
The
tide seems to be turning, however.
When Maggenti set out to recast Us, Them and Me this
year, concerns about kissing another woman "didn't even
come up once." First-time director Angela
Robinson told AfterEllen.com in an interview
last July that when she was casting for her feature film D.E.B.S.,
she was "barraged with actresses who wanted to be in the
movie. The actresses I met with were generally not that worried
about playing a gay character."
She
eventually cast two up-and-coming actresses--Jordana Brewster
(The Fast and the Furious) and Sara Foster (The
Big Bounce)--in the lesbian roles, something Robinson doesn't
believe would have happened five years ago.
Olga
Sosnovska, who played the groundbreaking bisexual character
Lena on All My Children,
told AfterEllen.com in an October 2003 interview
that she wasn't fazed upon receiving the information that her
character would turn out to be bisexual. Although she "didn't
think it would be as controversial as it turned out to be,"
Sosnovska insists "it wouldn't have made any difference."
Her
very public role as one-half of daytime's first lesbian couple
clearly didn't hurt her career: she departed All My Children
recently for a prominent role on a hit British spy series.
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