Openly gay veteran actor Ian McKellen — known for his performances in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit — slammed Hollywood for not having enough gay characters in films.
In an interview with Time Out, McKellen said, “nobody looks to Hollywood for social commentary,” and complained that films were not portraying enough gay men.
McKellen said, “half of Hollywood is gay,” yet in films, “gay men don’t exist.” The X-Men star also accused the movie industry of mistreating “women in every possible way throughout its history” and said it was not until recently that Hollywood “discovered that there were black people in the world.”
The comments from McKellen came after the gay advocacy group GLAAD released a report where they complained that Hollywood films didn’t include enough LGBTQ characters in 2017, despite a year where gay-centered movies like Call Me by Your Name and Love, Simon were released to critical acclaim.
No stranger to controversy comments, McKellen scolded Hollywood in the wake of the sexual harassment scandals involving some of the industry’s most celebrated figures.
“I hope we’re going through a period that will help to eradicate it altogether,” McKellen said last December during a lecture at the Oxford Union. “But from my own experience, when I was starting acting in the early Sixties, the director of the theatre I was working at showed me some photographs he got from women who were wanting jobs… some of them had at the bottom of their photograph ‘DRR’ — directors’ rights respected. In other words, if you give me a job, you can have sex with me.”
“That was commonplace from people who proposed that they should be a victim. Madness,” the actor added. “People have taken advantage of that and encouraged it and it absolutely will not do.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.