Yesterday we posted the first very brief footage from the HBO TV movie, The Normal Heart, based on Larry Kramer’s acclaimed play about the early days of the AID epidemic in New York.
Now one of the film’s stars, Taylor Kitsch, has been talking about how it wasn’t just an acting challenge for him, but also a learning one, as before the movie he knew very little about AIDS in the 1980s.
When asked by Vulture, ‘So how did The Normal Heart stretch you?’, he answered: “I mean, look: I was born in ’81. I had no idea about the whole AIDS epidemic. I’m straight, and playing a gay guy who’s leading a double life, who’s still in the closet, who’s losing his lovers, who has AIDS but won’t admit it to himself, who ends up dying … I mean, where do you want to start? F–k me, dude. It’s insane. The body type, the fact that he works at Citibank, very high up on Wall Street, so learning that part of it and reading an insane amount of books about guys who were leading those kinds of lives, learning about AZT and where it started … I knew probably the surface stuff, but what I learned for this, the education I got, that was another great tool.”
The Normal Heart, which also stars Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons and Jonathan Groff, will screen next May (TBC) on HBO.
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