A few weeks ago we reported on rumours that actor Luke Grimes had left True Blood because it was proposed his character would have a gay storyline in the latest (and final) season. While Grimes’ representatives obfuscated and said he left to explore other opportunities, his co-star and the potential love interest, Nathan Ellis (who plays Lafayette in True Blood), seems in little doubt about why Grimes quit – and he’s not impressed.
When asked by Vulture about whether he’d spoken to Grimes before he left, Ellis answered, “I didn’t, but I’m completely … I mean, I can say I’m not going to make a comment, but I just think that, you’re an actor, you’re an actor on a show that’s True Blood, we’re all sitting there going, ‘You quit your job because … really?’ I’m just… I’m over him. You quit your job because you don’t want to play a gay part? As if it’s … You know what? I’m going to stop talking.”
He doesn’t stop talking though and adds, “You have to be open. But more importantly, you make a statement when you do something like that. I did a documentary called Damn Wonderful, about gay suicide, and you make a statement, a big statement, when you go, ‘I don’t want to play this part because it’s gay.’ If you have a child, if you have a son, and he comes out as gay, what are you going to do? If you have a daughter who comes out gay …? You just made a statement, and it has ripple effects. First of all, this show, it’s True Blood, and shit, we get scared when we read scripts! Excuse my language. When scripts come, we’re like, ‘What are they going to have us do this week?’ But when you make a statement that is a judgment … I was kind of like, ‘Have you met Alan Ball?’ I’m supposed to do what my boss tells me to do, as an actor. I can’t approach a character with judgment. I certainly can’t tell my boss, ‘I can act what I want to act, but not what you tell me to act,’ especially on a show where you come in, knowing what it is. I was like, ‘Okay… I guess?’ I just thought that, having just done the documentary, I didn’t like what he did because he made a statement, and sometimes you have to take responsibility.”
However he’s got nothing but good things to say about the actor who took over the role of vampire James, Nathan Parsons, gushing, “I can’t say enough about Nathan…It’s easy breezy. I mean, he’s a wonderful actor. I love watching him work. Love watching him work. Our first scene together, I just listened to him talk most of the time. And we have good chemistry, and it worked. It worked.”
In a separate interview with THR, Parsons suggests he has few qualms about taking over the part – and the gay element of it – saying, “This story is important and should be told and needs to be shared. It’s a story that’s being told all over the place, and TV doesn’t pay enough attention to it.”
He also talks of the difficulty of shooting the sex scenes between himself and Nelsan – not because he was squeamish, but because he was extremely keen they got the right tone. “We didn’t want it to be uncomfortable to watch or over the top,” he says. “It has to be something that is seemingly organic and loving, instead of just having sex for the sake of having sex. I think that was the difficult line to walk. It comes out of nowhere and we have to do it tastefully, and we all have to be comfortable with what’s happening.”
As principal photography commences it’s been confirmed that Robert Sheehan (The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Misfits), Jack Fox (Dracula, Fresh Meat), Lily Cole (The Moth Diaries, Snow-white and the Huntsman) David O’Hara (Reach Me, The Departed) and Tamzin Merchant (Jane Eyre, The Tudors) are all set to star in the Brit drama, The Messenger.
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For the past few months Guy Ritchie has been hard at work on the film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which is due in cinemas this winter. However he’s also got a King Arthur movie percolating away, which already has a July 2016 release date set.
There are lots of LGBT film festivals all around the world, but the fact is that most of the time the ‘T’ in that acronym gets short shrift. While a few films of transgender interest will be shown, it often feels the festival is just paying lip service to trans* stories.