Thought For The Day: Ben Whishaw

"With gay characters being played by straight people, straight characters being played by gay people, come on, we're actors.

"I do not understand what the problem is. Actors play all sorts of things. I've played murderers, journalists and kings - I'm not any of them. The whole thing is a fiction, it's about imagination, it's play. I am baffled to why it's such a big thing.

"And also, I'm baffled because it feels like we're in a time where there are lots of gay people, not just actors but in all walks of life, and let's be where we are. We're human beings and I don't understand why it's really a discussion now.
 
"The Matt Damon thing, it has probably been taken out of context but I don't understand the heat around it. It feels like a story that's trying to be drummed up, even though there are more important things we should be talking about."

Press Association.

Fagburn now retracts his statement about Ben being boring and dim-witted.

Matt Damon: & Me

Sake.

A piece almost interstellar in its sheer solipstic vapid banality.

Matt Damon: You Can't Say That!

Today in Matt Damon Mansplains It All, the Martian star suggests gay actors shouldn’t publicly come out of the closet if they want to be successful. We suggest he stop talking.

Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast.

The article is actually quite nuanced, but the line 'Damon posits that gay actors should stay in the closet if they want their careers to thrive' is such a silly misreprentation of what he meant.

This article - but of course - caused the inevitable Twitterstorm from hysterical gaybores.

Here's Matt Damon's rather bland comment to The Observer.

“I think it must be really hard for actors to be out publicly. But in terms of actors, I think you’re a better actor the less people know about you period. And sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality because that’s one of the mysteries that you should be able to play.”

But why not twist it so you can all play the victim and have a jolly good online whine?

PS Obligatory Guardian Cif liberal winky-wank.

Edit: To clarify, I think Matt's point was that great stars tend to be mysterious and enigmatic. That. Is. All.

Michael Douglas: You're The Top

"This is a two-hander.
“And, Matt, you’re only as good as your other hand.
“You were magnificent, and the only reason I’m standing here is because of you - so you really deserve half of this.
“So, you want the bottom or the top?
 "The top? I figured that!"

From Michael Douglas's ever so risqué acceptance speech after winning the Best Actor gong at the Emmys last night.
Or, as the Mirror put it "peppering his speech with jokey ‘gay’ references."
Think they put 'gay' in inverted commas in case the jokes sued for libel.
Sir Elton of John paid tribute to Liberace and sang one of his lovely songs from his newly-released album, that had nothing to do with Lee but Elt said it reminds him of him.
Thanks Reg, means a lot.
Behind The Candleabra also won best (TV) movie.
Fagburn approves - you don't see nearly enough staight actors getting lauded for playing gay, do you?
So brave etc etc.

PS The Sun saw the story from a different angle; Michael Douglas thanks 'my wife Catherine' as he picks up Emmy. Good for him.
The Daily Mail zoomed in on "Matt Damon's beautiful wife, and devoted a whole two sentences to mentioning the bio-pic about the "flamboyant piano player©".
Luciana Damon's frock got a dedicated five paragraph box.

Update via The Bilerico Project...

"[Liberace's] program aired in England, and I was keenly aware of his enormous talent and its impact on the musical world. (And my dress sense, of course.) What I was not aware of until years later was his lifestyle -- yeah right, ummm... oh well! -- which, due to the tenor of the times, had to be concealed."

-- Sir Elton John, balking mid-sentence on live television last night in brief remarks before his performance at the Emmy Awards. Sir Elton had clearly not written the speech and had likely not even read it before the telecast. It's unclear whether John bristled at the suggestion that he was unaware of Liberace's sexual orientation, or at the Emmy writers' jarringly incorrect use of the word "lifestyle" to describe being gay -- a term that hasn't been socially acceptable since the days of Liberace himself.

MIchael Douglas: A Little Behind

Despite the fabulous photo above promoting Behind The Candelabra, The Sunday Times puts Michael Douglas in their News Review section, rather than in Culture or the magazine.
That's because in the interview (bought in from New York magazine), he doesn't talk much about the film.
It's a profile of him where; "Michael Douglas describes his recent battle with cancer, his son’s imprisonment and how playing Liberace reflects his own old-school Hollywood grit."
Oh, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
When he's asked about the film ("the toast of Cannes last week"), it's that question that every (presumably) straight journalist wants to know - WHAT WAS IT LIKE DOING THE GAY SEX SCENES?!!!

Behind The Candelabra: Two Minute Trailer

Have to say this looks wonderful...

PS Loopy interview with Stephan Soderbergh from Hollywood Reporter that asks; "Do you see the film as making a statement 
about marriage equality?" Cause that worked out real well...

Liberace: King/Queen Of Gonzo!

Entertainment Weekly gets the scoop on Behind The Candelabra, and dishes the dirt on Lee.
Also has the first proper photos of Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in character.
Sadly not available online, but we do get a few teaser quotes.

"The scene where I’m behind him and going at him, we did that in one take,” recalls Damon, laughing. “We do it. Cut. There’s a long pause. And then you just hear Steven [Soderbergh] go, “Well… I have no notes.”

Wonder if it was the bumming etc that apparently made many Hollywood studios turn it down?
Mind you there was a lot of that in the recent Ginsberg/Radcliffe fillum Kill Your Darlings.
Hmm...
If the UK "release" for this HBO TV movie means it just gets stuck on Sky Atlantic I is gonna be so mad.  

Liberace: "Too Gay"

Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh says his upcoming film about Liberace is airing on HBO instead of getting a theatrical release because studios thought it was "too gay."
The upcoming "Behind the Candelabra" has Michael Douglas in a compulsively watchable performance as the celebrated pianist, Matt Damon as his young lover and Soderbergh directing. It comes, in other words, from a trio of A-listers. So why isn't it a theatrical release?
"Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town," the "Traffic" and "Ocean's 11" director told TheWrap on Friday, at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. "We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it."
Wait a minute, we said. Let us get this straight: No studio would budget $5 million for a movie with Damon and Douglas?
"They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after 'Brokeback Mountain,' by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us..."

TheWrap.
There's no way of checking this, but I have to say I doubt it.

Update: This story became a big thing in both the straight and gay media.
As above, there's no way of checking its veracity, but - here's an idea - journalists might question it.
If I said I was the first gay man on the moon, would you obediently reprint that?

Matt Damon: Thought For The Day

“I never denied those rumours because I didn’t want to offend my friends who were gay – as if being gay were some kind of disease.
“It put me in a weird position in that sense. The whole thing was just gross."

Matt Damon quoted in The Sun.*
Have to say I'm addicted to scurrilous showbiz gay gossip, but never heard any rumours Matt Damon and Ben Afleck were a couple.

Damon also talks about the forthcoming Liberace biopic, Behind The Candleabra.
“We both have a lot of gay friends and we were not going to screw this up or bulls*** it.
“It wasn’t the most natural thing in the world to do, though. Like, for one scene, I had to come out of a pool, go over to Michael, straddle him on a chaise longue and start kissing him.
“And throughout the script, it’s not like I kiss him just once. We drew it up like a football plan.”

The Sun describe Liberace as the "flamboyant pianist", natch.

* Here's the original interview in US Playboy - a must-read at Fagburn Towers..

Liberace: Flamboyant Pianist

One of the sunniest entertainers ever to come along, flamboyant pianist Wladziu Valentino Liberace – known simply as Liberace – may have had a dark side, but he kept it carefully concealed from his public. 
That is bound to change next year when HBO airs the movie Behind the Candelabra, now filming with a cast-against-type Michael Douglas as the gilded showman and Matt Damon as his much younger lover, Scott Thorson – who exposed his life with Lee in a tell-all book and also sued for $113 million in palimony. 
"He thought his personal life was nobody's business," the real-life Thorson told PEOPLE in 1987, when Liberace, 67, died from Aids.
Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean's 11 and Magic Mike), directs the HBO production, whose title comes from the elaborate décor with which Liberace surrounded himself, including his trademark candelabra on the piano. Also in the cast: Rob Lowe, Debbie Reynolds, Dan Aykroyd, Scott Bakula and Cheyenne Jackson. 
In the scene shown here and taken on the set Monday, Douglas and Damon, both in character, are shopping for a car. 

People.
First onset photo to be released.
Think it's meant to look like it's unofficial.
God, I love Lee - this better be great.

Liberace: Candelabra In The Wind

Michael Douglas has reportedly signed up to play Liberace in a big budget biopic directed by Steven Soderbergh.
The screenplay is based on Behind The Candelabra - My Life With Liberace, written by Lee's last lover, Scott Thorson.
His yumminess Matt Damon is set to play Thorson.
The book focuses on Lee's relationship with his much younger lover (I'm sure Douglas can empathise), their separation - and an infamous "gaylimoney" case - and Liberace's denial about and then death from Aids.
Despite his very public denials of being gay, Liberace always seemed like a queer hero to Fagburn.
Maybe the new film will reposition him as a gay martyr, but of a very different colour to that Oscar-magnet Harvey Milk.
In a strange piece of synchronicity, Sacha Baron Cohen is to play Freddie Mercury, the other big name musical loss to Aids, in a new film scripted by Peter Morgan.
The 19th anniversary of Freddie's death was marked by BBC World Service's Witness where his personal assistant, Peter Freestone, remembered his last days.