While in the old days of Hollywood, the tendency was towards aggressive publicity to hide a gay actor’s sexuality from the audience, George Lazenby has claimed that in the case of James Bond, producers were keen to ensure they didn’t let a gay 007 onto the big screen at all.
The Express reports that in the new documentary Everything Or Nothing, which is about the making of the Bond films, Lazenby says that during the audition process, producers devised a practical test to find out his sexuality. “They sent a girl up to my apartment to make sure I wasn’t gay,” he says. “A little while later they had their answer. I sure as hell wasn’t.”
Indeed playing the spy proved a good way for George to be as heterosexual as possible. “Suddenly I was James Bond and you can imagine what that did to me,” says Lazenby. “I don’t want to brag but I had at least one girl a day… There was a tent on set where the stuntmen used to keep the mattresses they fell on in fight scenes. It was a good place to take a chick if you were in a hurry.”
It seems slightly odd to send a random woman to someone in the hope that they’re so heterosexual they simply can’t help themselves but sleep with them, as it would appear Lazenby would not only have lost out on the role not because he was gay, but also if he didn’t like one night stands. At least it worked for him though.
Well, it worked briefly, as Lazenby only got to make one Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with most believing the former model to have been a bit of a failure in the role, with Sean Connery being lured back after George’s effort.
The documentary’s director, Stevan Riley, comments on Lazenby’s claim, “I had no way of confirming if the story was true, I just left it in the edit and waited to see if Eon approved it.” Obviously they let it stand, so perhaps there is some truth in it.
The HIV/AIDS crisis is something that everyone from all different walks of life has heard of. From television, book and films to magazine articles, everyone has a pretty good understanding of what happened during the 1980s.
After the production code was brought in during the 1930s in Hollywood it became much harder to show several different things on the Hollywood Screen.
It wasn’t until the 2000s with the release of Brokeback Mountain that we finally saw a mainstream Hollywood Blockbuster depict two gay men as the lead characters. Alas they were very tragic figures but it was a true portrayal of the time it was set in. But since this we have still not seen many big Hollywood films featuring unambiguously gay characters as leads.
Zac was also happy to be ‘eroticised’ by director Lee Daniels, who’s spoken about how he brings his gay sensibility to his film. “I’ve always just embraced Lee as a brilliant artist,” Efron says, “So I followed him blindly, trustingly, and wholeheartedly. He’s searching for beauty and truth in every scene, so I believed in him and always felt safe.
