Back in the early 1990s, Scandal star Tony Goldwyn was an up and comer who looked like he had a chance of breaking big, particularly thanks to his villainous role in Ghost. However the same year that movie was released he took on the role of Jeff Mitchell in The Sum of Us, playing a young gay man in a play about his character’s relationship with his father.
The play started out at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, but after it gained buzz an Off-Broadway transfer was planned. It was then that people started suggesting perhaps Tony shouldn’t go with it.
During a HuffPost Live interview, Goldwyn reflected on the play, saying, “I got all of this advice [saying], ‘Yeah, but if you play a gay character people are going to think you’re gay. This is really going to hurt your career. You have a chance to be a movie star, and you can’t do that.”
He wasn’t deterred though, adding, “I thought to myself… if I don’t have the courage to do something that I believe in because I’m afraid, then I don’t deserve to be an artist. And so that really made the decision for me, that I was going to do it. I realized that it was an act of activism to publicly say ,‘Screw you, this is important to speak about this…’ It was an act of activism even though I was just doing my job.”
It turned out to be a good move for Goldwyn, as he received an Obie Award (which celebrates off-Broadway theatre) for his performance.
He also talks about how before The Sum Of Uf he’d played one of the first characters with AIDS on US network TV in an episode of Designing Women. His character was a gay man who wanted the ladies to design his funeral.
“It was one of my first jobs and the character had AIDS,” he says. “[The show’s creator] Linda Bloodworth-Thomason put it on prime-time television for the first time. It was quite moving and I didn’t realize how powerful that impact would be … To this day people come up to me (and say) ‘You don’t know what impact that had on our community and thank you.'”
Take a look at the full interview below. [Read more…]