It Turns Out ‘The Transporter’ Was Gay, But Only in the Mind of Its Director

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that most of Queerty’s readership remains blissfully unaware of The Transporter franchise, which is about guns and Jason Statham and a lot of fast car chases– or so we gathered from the 13 seconds of the trailer we were able to watch before our eyes started to bleed.

Well, it turns out that in the first two movies, the lead character, Frank Martin (Statham) was a flaming homosexual, except the director forgot to tell anyone this fact and so, the latest installment’s director Olivier Megaton (an action director with the last name of ‘megaton’–heh, that’s not made up) went ahead and included lots of hot hook-up scenes with Natalya Rudakova, who is most definitely not a dude.

Director Lou Leterrier previously explained the homo subtext to the L.A. Times:

“If you watch the movie and you know he’s gay, it becomes so much more fun. It’s so great — the first gay action movie hero!” He continued: “Action fans in general are pretty homophobic. You see these tough guys who say, ‘ “The Transporter,” that’s such a great movie!’ If they only knew they’re really cheering for a new kind of action hero.”

And to drive his point home, he mentioned a scene in “Transporter 2” in which a drug czar’s wife, played by Amber Valletta, makes romantic overtures toward the Transporter. Martin rebuffs her, explaining, “It’s because of who I am.”

Letterrier’s take on that? “That’s him coming out!”

But it turns out that the whole thing was a big funny misunderstanding as L.A. Times reporter Geoff Boucher found out when he went back to the original director to see what he thought of his gay character turning straight:

“I e-mailed Leterrier a few days ago to get his take on “Transporter 3” and director Olivier Megaton’s choice to make the character heterosexual. “Haha, I haven’t seen it. I can’t wait,” Leterrier wrote back. But wasn’t he just a little disappointed Megaton had changed the character’s sexual orientation? Leterrier seemed to back off the gay Transporter theme he embraced three years ago.

“I was sick over the weekend and my 2 Transporters were on, so I watched them and in fact they aren’t that gay,” Leterrier wrote. “But it makes for fun movie legends.”

The only thing lamer than outing a gay character after the fact is putting that character back in the closet. Since Bryan Singer missed out on his chance to direct his own version of the Harvey Milk story and since he’s going to be looking for work after the release of Valkyrie (Tom Cruise is a good Nazi, do we have to say more?) , maybe he can take a crack at gaying up Statham in the inevitable Transporter 4.

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