Guy Pearce in retreat on transgender roles argument

Guy Pearce says actors should not have to announce their gender identity or sexual preference to attain work, and it should not be used to preclude them from roles.

Actor Guy Pearce. Picture: Mark Stewart

Guy Pearce says actors should not have to announce their gender identity or sexual preference to attain work, and it should not be used to preclude them from roles.

On Tuesday, Pearce made a series of tweets criticising the ­argument that only transgender actors should be cast in transgender roles. “Isn’t the point of an actor to be able to play anyone outside your own world?” he wrote. “Many people out there with incredible life experiences … fall flat when the camera is rolling. It’s an art form.”

Within 24 hours, the actor whose breakout role was as a drag queen in the 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, released a statement apologising for “insensitive” tweets, writing that casting “the subject on to one minority group in particular was ­unnecessary.”

In the tweets, which have since been deleted, Pearce wrote: “If the only people allowed to play trans characters are transfolk, then are we also suggesting the only people trans folk can play are trans characters?”

He added that Hollywood’s reckoning with authenticity in casting underrepresented identities could limit the career options of transgender actors.

In his statement, he criticised the acting industry as a “cesspool of politics, bums on seats funding, nepotism and favouritism.”

He said the argument he was trying to convey was a defence of acting as an artform, and he apologised for “crassly” singling out the “already harassed” transgender community.

“The point I wanted to raise was one about defending the definition of acting and nothing more,” he wrote.

“It’s clear a great many minority commun­ities are under­­represented on screen and that so too are actors from those ­communities.”

He said he didn’t believe actors should have to announce their “personal identity, sexual preference, political stance, disability, religious beliefs, etc” to get work, adding that this idea that acting can only come from one’s lived experience “annihilates our imagination”.