Could Sean Penn make “ Milk ” today? It’s a question the actor answered himself, in a recent profile by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. “It could not happen in a time like this,” he said, of his performance as the slain gay politician. “It’s a time of tremendous overreach.
It’s a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.” Penn is clearly passionate about the Gus Van Sant-directed film, which won him his second Oscar and which, he says, was “the last time I had a good time” on sets more than 15 years after its 2008 release. He’s part of a class of A-listers from an age where the celebrity class was untouchable, and — like Jerry Seinfeld and Jennifer Aniston — he seems visibly irritated by the shifts in power toward the audience.
In fairness, it is perhaps hard to believe that the precise way “Milk” was cast — with not just Harvey Milk but multiple of his fellow queer activists played by actors who appear to be straight — would play out in the same fashion in 2024. (The recent Showtime series “Fellow Travelers,” like “Milk” a historical drama about the LGBTQ civil-rights struggle, featured as its two leads two out gay actors, Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey.) And yet.
There was no outcry over Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist playing (at least) hetero-flexible courtship in the recent “Challengers.” Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc was revealed to be happily partnered to a man in the last “Knives Out” film. Sterling K.
