Josh Gad reflects on “his shit” about his character’s split-second moment in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast in 2017.
At the time, much was made of Gad’s character LeFou dancing with another man in a short scene, prompting headlines that it was “the first gay Disney character” after director Bill Condon said in an interview that there was “a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.”
Gad, 43, writes about Condon’s comments in his new memoir In Gad we believe, saying that everything was overblown and that he had “never” played a gay character.
“I certainly didn’t feel like the LeFou the queer community was eagerly waiting for. I can’t quite imagine a Pride celebration honoring a ‘cinematic watershed moment’ involving a quasi-villain Disney sidekick dancing with a man for half a second, I mean, gay, I’d be mad for sure,” he said Frozen the actor writes in the book, according to Entertainment Weekly.
He adds that the team behind Beauty and the Beast was “never discussed” at the center of “LeFou’s sexuality, which frankly wasn’t something to explore in the film’s random comedic characters… or so I thought.”
A quick same-sex dance scene “seemed harmless enough—a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fun moment,” Gad recalls thinking.
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Luke Evans and Josh Gad in “Beauty and the Beast” (2017).
DISNEY/MOVIESTORE/Alamy
After the Condons Paragraph interview, the phrase “an exclusively gay moment” became controversial, prompting boycotts and even banning of the film in certain countries that censor LGBTQ content. The film — which starred Emma Watson, Dan Stevens and Luke Evans — nevertheless became a huge hit, grossing over $1 billion at the global box office.
Had he known that so much emphasis would be placed on a “seemingly sweet and innocuous moment,” he “never would have agreed” to it, Gad says in the book: It was “both too little and not enough to be anything more than that.”
“If the audience had defined it as a sweet exclusively gay moment, I would have been thrilled,” he writes. “But as soon as we pointed it out and seemingly congratulated ourselves, we invited hell and fury.”
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Josh Gad June 16, 2024
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In March 2017, director Condon told ScreenCrush that his comments had become “overblown,” adding, “Why is it a big deal?” Then, in 2022, Gad remarked to The Independent that they “didn’t go far enough” with gay representation “to deserve praise”.
“We haven’t gone far enough to say, ‘Look how brave we are.’ My regret about what happened is that it became ‘Disney’s first explicitly gay moment,’ and it was never meant to be,” he said at the time. “We never intended it to be a moment that we should praise ourselves for, because honestly, I don’t think we’ve done justice to what a real gay character in a Disney movie should be.”
“That wasn’t LeFou. If we’re going to pat ourselves on the back, then we should’ve gone the hell out of it,” Gad continued. “Everybody deserves a chance to see themselves on screen, and I don’t think we’ve done enough — and I certainly haven’t done enough to do that.”
We believe in Gad it is now available wherever books are sold.
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Source: HIS Education