Tom Hollander address his sexuality in light of gay roles in ‘The White Lotus’ & ‘Feud’

I have been asked to play several gay characters over the years… People keep asking me to do it because apparently when I play these characters, it’s believable. And that’s, in a way, where my job begins and ends.

For some reason, who I am, who I am as a person allows me to present as gay. Yeah, sometimes I do present as gay….

I’m somebody that walks into a room and there are some people who walk into the room, you go, “Well, they’re not gay,” and, “They are gay.” My own sexuality is sufficiently liberal to have encompassed many different experiences, which are not anyone’s business.

I certainly have not lived the life that gay men used to have to live. I have not lived that difficulty. I have not had to live in the shadows and been under the threat of going to jail for expressing my sexuality.

As an actor, you have to be able to imagine something and do it with seriousness and take it seriously, approach it with sufficient sort of solemnity and plausibility, and then you imaginatively put yourself into those shoes. That’s what it is. I mean, it’s true of playing any part. You are rarely playing yourself. You are always pretending to be something that you are not. That’s on the tin of being an actor…

There are issues about representation. There are types of actors that have not been given sufficient chances to play great parts. All of these things are in the process of being revised and improved and changed, and that’s all absolutely right.

At the same time as that movement is happening, what shouldn’t be sacrificed is the sort of basic fundamental principle of actors being able to play things that they are not necessarily, because then that’s not art.

Tom Hollander speaking to Vanity Fair about playing gay roles, in light of his turn as author Truman Capote in FX’s ‘Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans.’