Actor and LGBTQ activist Billy Porter has confirmed that he will play the role of the Fairy Godmother in James Corden’s forthcoming live-action movie musical Cinderella.
“I have a couple of movies that I’m working on,” Porter announced on the New Yorker‘s Instagram Stories. “I’m gonna be playing the fairy godmother in the new Cinderella movie with Camila Cabello.”
E! News reports that the 22-year-old Cabello will play the role of Cinderella while also helping to write the film’s music. Porter and Cabello are currently the only two actors announced for the remake, which is described as a “modern re-imagining of the classic fairytale.”
Porter’s rise to prominence comes partly off the back of his role as the exuberant ballroom emcee Pray Tell in the FX series Pose, for which he became the first openly-gay black actor to win an Emmy in a drama series.
However, the Broadway veteran has repeatedly bemoaned what he described as the vicious levels of homophobia he has encountered throughout his career. Porter described, to an audience Saturday night at the New Yorker Festival, the music industry as “hugely, violently homophobic” and became more “about trying to fix myself so other people would feel comfortable around me.”
Accepting his Emmy Award last month, Porter also complained about homophobia across America.
“The category is love, you all. Love. I am so overwhelmed and I am so overjoyed to have lived long enough to see this day,” he said at the time. “James Baldwin said, ‘Took many years of vomiting up all the filth that I had been taught about myself and halfway believed before I could walk around this earth like I had the right to be here.’ I have the right. You have the right. We all have the right.”
The 50-year-old actor is also known for his excessive flamboyance. At this year’s Oscars, Porter turned up on the red carpet wearing a custom tuxedo dress as a tribute to the late Hector Valle, owner of the House of Xtravaganza, one of New York City’s most famous underground ballroom houses.
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