(UPDATED) Weekend (q.v.) star Tom Cullen:
I’ve played very masculine high-status guys. In my career, I want to always be pushing myself. And Russell was somebody who’s so honest, so damaged in many ways, and very lost. Very low-status. And that’s somebody who I wanted to get myself around. I’m guarded and it was a challenge to strip that away.
Chris New (also in Bent) is certainly gay; I rather expect Tom Cullen is, given his dodging of a dusty question dragged out of a closet:
- Was this the first time you played a gay person?
It’s never really crossed my mind because, for me, sexuality doesn’t mean anything…. This is a love story. A story about two people who connect and something that happens between them. We’ve all felt it – gay, straight, bisexual, curious, questioning, or whatever these silly names we give to this.
Yes, and straight guys have all those “silly names” readily rolling off the tongue in press interviews.
After the screening at Inside Out, director Andrew Haigh was asked if the actors were gay or straight. In a dodge right out of Hays Code Hollywood, Haigh told the audience to ask them ourselves. There’s more than enough evidence for any seasoned Kremlinologist without going to that kind of trouble.
Update
(2011.08.24) Tom Cullen is billed as straight in Out (unreadable original; Readability version). That’s one theory.