Dylan O'Brien was asked to weigh in on the question of the century during a recent interview: Should straight actors be able to play gay characters, and is it taking roles away from queer actors? The actor, who plays a set of twins in Twinless — one of whom is gay — has chimed in.
"Permission goes a long way, James [Sweeney] is a gay man, and coming from a place I could trust," O'Brien told Dazed magazine in an interview. "We had a similar take on straight actors playing gay parts, especially in recent years: You started seeing straight actors playing a queer role completely straight," the actor said. "It started to feel inauthentic. It was nice to have his insight, support, and calibration. He'd be like, 'Go crazy on this one. We can dial it back if it doesn't feel real.'"
Sweeney was asked the same question. The out filmmaker and actor replied, "These are larger-than-life characters that feel so real because he brings so much pathos." He continued, "In terms of him playing queer, I’ll take credit for giving him permission and pushing him in a direction that's fluid with masculinity and femininity. A lot of times, when straight actors play gay, they don’t lean into that out of fear of being vilified by the public, and are like, ‘We’re all the same, so I’m just going to play myself.’ I don’t mean that as a denigration to other straight actors, but I felt for Rocky to be attracted to Dennis, he would need to be comfortable with both masculinity and femininity – in my experience of dating.”
Last year, O'Brien talked about how the two developed a "gay scale" during filming, where Sweeney would tell him if he was acting "too straight" during a take where he needed to be gay. “Most of the time, he’d be like, ‘You were too straight on that,’” he explained to Variety. "I was happy for that permission … a sign of a great filmmaker is to always give you the permission to go into a direction or not.”
