Straight gay pay
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Moral of the story? You’re 18. Andrew Rannells, who plays Cole, is openly gay. Because it’s withheld. While it’s not always about awards, they remain a useful barometer for how Hollywood validates certain stories and performances.
But here’s the harder question: would studios have trusted the film’s commercial viability without someone like Nick Kroll—a known, bankable, heterosexual star—to anchor it?
It’s hard not to think of “Bros” (2022), the first major studio gay rom-com, which had a historic amount of marketing support from Universal—and still opened under $5 million.
We watch.
And when he moans “fuck yeah, bro” into his phone camera for £9.99 a month — we let ourselves believe it’s for us.
Just like we did in the Clio.
So…the “peach scene.” In 2017, the world watched with bated breath as rising star Timothée Chalamet defiled a fruit in Luca Guadagnino’s iconic queer love story, “Call Me By Your Name.” The actor’s ability to depict raw, unfiltered emotions—even when messily masturbating with a peach—took the world by storm and catapulted his previously dim celebrity into full-on super-stardom.
All arguably more “expected” choices for this kind of role. As gleaned from the overwhelming amount of Academy attention garnered by these actors’ portrayals of homosexual characters, it seems as if many actors consider “playing gay” a sure-fire way to please critics and elevate their professional careers. More about Patrick Curran
But a list of straight actors successfully playing gay would be obvious (Tom Hanks, Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and frankly dull.
Colman Domingo was only the second openly gay man ever nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars—for “Rustin” in 2024—following Ian McKellen’s nomination in 1999 for “Gods and Monsters”. While straight performers are celebrated for taking a “risk” by stepping into queer roles, queer performers are still often considered too risky to lead at all.
This isn’t simply about identity politics—it’s about who gets to shape culture.
Straight men — or at least, straight-posturing men — have long been positioned as the pinnacle of homoerotic desire. What if this isn’t about audiences at all, but about who gets to be seen as commercially safe?
Historically, this is nothing new. The rugby lad who called you a faggot and then watched your stories religiously years later.
The kind that feels like validation when you’ve spent most of your life feeling unwanted.
And that feeling — that mix of secrecy, shame, and thrill — sticks with you. But something shifts. Jodie Foster, also openly queer, was nominated that same year for her supporting role in “Nyad”. It felt like access.
Is Nick Kroll queer?
From what I can tell, he isn’t. “There is not a movie that is not gay if it’s great or at least queer.” Films that are overtly queer or have homosexual undertones often provide more opportunity for emotional depth than films that focus on traditional, heteronormative roles. And it’s real.
So yeah, we pay.
Until studios believe in queer actors the same way they believe in straight ones playing queer, we will continue to see our own reflections filtered through someone else’s idea of what our lives should look like. But it’s also deeply sad. But worth interrogating.
Would this film have been greenlit if Colman Domingo, Andrew Scott, or Matt Bomer were in the lead instead alongside Rannells?