LA Confidential and Memento star Guy Pearce has made a lengthy apology after tweeting about the debate around roles for trans actors.
Pearce, whose breakout role was as a drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, had questioned the debate around trans actors playing both trans and non-trans characters in a now-deleted tweet.
Pearce had written: “A question – if the only people allowed to play trans characters r trans folk, then r we also suggesting the only people trans folk can play r trans characters. Surely that will limit ur career as an actor? Isn’t the point of an actor to be able play anyone outside ur own world?”
He had then engaged with several respondents, debating the roles available to trans actors and saying this was “a very different point” to the one he was making.
Today he issued a long letter on Twitter, in which he offered “sincere apologies for crassly focussing on just one already harassed minority.”
He said he understood that his question was “insensitive” and that his point he was trying to raise was about “defending the definition of acting and nothing more… Throwing the subject onto one minority group in particular was unnecessary, especially from a man like me, with a “Full House” of privilege.”
Pearce said that “none of this is straightforward,” but had raised the point after “many people” asked him whether “gay people should have played” the lead roles in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert since it was released in 1994. “Similar discussions are occurring about trans actors and trans roles,” he added.
Pearce said he did not believe artists should have to reveal their “personal identities, sexual preference, political stance, disability, religious beliefs etc” to gain work but acknowledged: “It’s clear a great many minor communities are underrepresented on screen and that so too are actors from those communities.”
He said the debate had led him to “reflect more about acting and its place in the world,” adding: “Our industry is already a cesspool of politics, bums of seats funding, nepotism and favouritism.”
