Joanna Lumley has said the world will become “boring beyond disbelief” if actors aren’t allowed to play characters with differing sexualities or nationalities to their own.
The 79-year-old Absolutely Fabulous star stated in a new interview that casting directors were stripping acting away from the craft “because they’re saying, ‘If you’re going to play a lesbian, you’ve got to be a lesbian’”.
When asked if she had been put in a box throughout her 50-year-long career, Lumley replied “sort of”, adding: “They’re not going to put me in as a Scottish Highland woman. Even if I could get the accent right, you wouldn’t go to me first. And also, in today’s climate, they would go to somebody who is a Scot.”
Lumely told the i that she “completely understands” why, highlighting the 1989 film My Left Foot, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays an Irish man with severe cerebral palsy.
“He wouldn’t have been allowed to do it,” said Lumley. “Maybe the film wouldn’t have been allowed to be made. And so you suddenly think, ‘Hang on, where is the line?’ It takes acting away from the whole thing.”
Lumley suggested that the entertainment industry should go back to “storytelling”, adding: “We’re entertainers, grasshoppers. If you can’t do that, then the world becomes boring beyond belief. If we can’t act things, what’s the point of actors?”
“And so, gradually we begin to strip away all the things that we felt we could do, like accents or different nationalities… All that’s going away from us. They’re going, ‘If it’s Italian, she’s got to be Italian.’”
When the interviewer pointed out that Lumley plays an American in her latest role in Netflix’s Wednesday, she replied: “I know I am.”
Lumley – who plays Jenna Ortega’s “grandmama” Hester Frump in the Addams family spin-off – added that she had asked the show’s star to monitor her American accent on set.
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“‘And I said to Jenna, ‘You’re to shout cut as soon as you hear my accent going grotesquely off the wire.’”
When asked if Ortega had obliged, Lumley replied: “She never did it. I’d have absolutely punished her if she had.”
In recent years, debate has surrounded the question of whether straight actors should play queer roles.
In 2021, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies declared that gay roles should be reserved for queer actors in a move towards greater authenticity.
Several straight actors, including Cate Blanchett, Rachel Weisz, Sean Penn and Suranne Jones, who have played queer characters, have disagreed with the idea.
“I will fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience,” Blanchett said in 2018, while Penn called the idea “a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination”.
However, in 2018, Darren Criss, who won a Golden Globe for his role as Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, vowed to turn down queer roles in the future for fear of being “another straight boy taking a gay man’s role”.
Lumley started performing in the late 1960s and is known for her roles in The New Avengers, Corpse Bride and, more recently, Amandaland.
