Eddie Redmayne recently said that he, a cis man, playing the part of trans woman Lili Elbe in the biopic of her life The Danish Girl, was ‘a mistake’. Well, of course. The casting garnered a lot of criticism six years ago when it was announced, especially from the trans community, and over half a decade later it’s hard to take Redmayne’s words seriously. He has now made all the money from a role that should never have been his and unless he is making financial reparations to trans charities, I find his words ring hollow. Redmayne taking this part pushes the transphobic narrative that trans women are really just men playing dress up, and not women in their own right.
Redmayne is of course a repeat offender. Just before The Danish Girl he made The Theory of Everything where he played scientist Stephen Hawking, who of course had Motor Neurone Disease and who eventually used a wheelchair and a computer as his voice. Redmayne was accused of ‘cripping up’ and many in the disabled community railed against his casting. And I agree. There are very talented disabled actors out there – some I’m sure who live with Motor Neurone Disease and could play the part from the inside – and they don’t get a look in when able-bodied actors are taking their roles.
But what about Hawking’s early life, when he was able bodied? A disabled actor wouldn’t be able to play that part, probably, you say. Okay, fine. Redmayne could have played the early Hawking. And then a different, disabled, actor could have played Hawking when he became disabled. This happens all the time in films and no one bats an eyelid, until something like this film comes along, and suddenly we’re all against it. Consider the biopic of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Love & Mercy, where Paul Dano plays the young Wilson and John Cusack plays the older Wilson. The viewer understands and accepts that they are playing the same man, even though they don’t look too alike. The same could happen with The Theory of Everything and films like it.
This brings me also to the many, many actors who have worn fat suits in films. From Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal to Jared Leto in The House of Gucci, fat suits have a long and problematic history. Again, my suggestion is just to hire the fat actor. As a fat person myself, I rarely see myself represented on screen, and fat suits just do not accurately portray how our bodies move or react. It’s lazy and often insulting to do this instead of just hiring a ‘fat’ actor – the actor may only ‘need’ to be fat by Hollywood standards which, as we all know, have horrendously strict weight and beauty limits for women especially but also for everyone else. And as for actually fat actors, I’m sure I’m not alone in only being able to name a handful who are truly famous (and even then, they’re often men, as men have more privilege in the area of weight than women do).
We live in a world where it was accepted when Cate Blanchett played one of the personas of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, so I’m sure we can live in a world where two different actors play the thin and fatter parts of someone’s life, or where a disabled person plays someone with a disability instead of an able-bodied actor who – let’s be honest – often doesn’t know what it’s like to live in a disabled body.
There are so many actors out of work, and often they aren’t white, or aren’t cis, or aren’t straight, or so on. Programmes like Pose – a drama about drag ball culture in New York in the 1980s and 1990s – prove that there are amazingly talented queer and trans actors out there ready to go. But they are often limited to roles that revolve around their queerness or their trans stories, instead of them being able to play any role in the way that cis, straight actors are able to. Cis, straight, white actors and others with immense privilege are stealing roles from oppressed people, meaning that minority actors aren’t able to break out into mainstream roles.
Level the playing field and then I may agree with Redmayne that “one should be able to play any sort of part if one plays it with a sense of integrity and responsibility”.
I don’t doubt he tried to do this for the part of Elbe, but the fact is, a cis man should never have been in the running.
Image credits: Gage Skidmore and Georges Biard
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