![]() “Love stories are often centred around the beginning, the discovering of each other. He likes that Love Is Strange focused on long-term love. “Your sexual orientation is irrelevant in terms of playing the character.” That said, he cheerfully concedes it would have been more fun snogging, say, Helen Mirren, than Lithgow, an old (heterosexual) friend. He does not think only gay actors should play gay roles, or vice versa. Other people are much more visible and vocal.” “Prick Up Your Ears may be viewed in some circles as an iconic movie, but me personally an icon? No. Molina has stood on platforms promoting equal rights, but considers himself a “straight ally” rather than a crusader. The two roles in some ways bookend the gay-rights struggle. There’s still a long way to go, but that’s an amazing journey that we’ve made.”Īlfred Molina as Kenneth Halliwell in Prick Up Your Ears. “There’s been a huge shift in gay politics and equal rights. Love Is Strange, in contrast, features gentle gents in a tolerant era. “There was a lot more grungy sex in that, chasing strangers down the street, snogging them in the corridor,” Molina recalls fondly. It ends tragically when Halliwell, superbly played by Molina, kills Gary Oldman’s Orton, then himself. ![]() It is a marked contrast to Prick Up Your Ears, the 1987 Stephen Frears film about the semi-clandestine relationship between the playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell in homophobic 1960s England. “Everything that happened to them could have happened to a straight couple. “Here we have a rather ordinary, late-middle-age couple.” Gayness was not the point. ![]() “This was a story at the complete opposite end of the Aids spectrum, where you so often see stories about same-sex relationships, where it’s young people finding each other and their way in the world, about promise and yearning,” says Molina. They sell their gorgeous apartment, and lodge separately with friends, precipitating a bittersweet meditation on love, friendship and belonging. When they take advantage of a law allowing them to marry, Molina’s music-teacher character is sacked from a Catholic school, shredding the couple’s finances. In his new film, Love Is Strange, which opens in Britain in February, Molina and John Lithgow play a New York couple who have been together for 39 years. ![]()
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