Sean Penn says he wouldn’t be ‘allowed’ to play Harvey Milk today as a straight actor

Actor Sean Penn has again defended his casting as Harvey Milk, as the debate about straight actors playing gay characters rumbles on.

Penn, who won his second best-actor Oscar for playing pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk in the 2008 biopic Milk, has said that limiting casting opportunities as part of an effort to tick diversity boxes only damages the art of filmmaking. 

During an appearance on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, Penn, who also won an Academy Award for Mystic River, said he’s “totally on board” with all industries “confronting the problem of what had been minimal diversity”.

He added: “There’s nobody of any gender or any race, or any alternate lifestyle that I’m not interested in if they have a story in their heart they want to tell.

“What I know is that the solution is not limiting the casting of Hamlet to Danish princes. And not only is it an attack on imagination that is our bread and butter, but [it] is a demonstration of the unimaginative who would ask it.

“I find it culturally offensive and venal and sad that that’s the easy solution for people to have group-think on and all those defences.

“I feel so lucky I got to play Harvey Milk because for me as an actor that wasn’t a gay man or a straight man, that was a different personality, and that’s what we’re supposed to be able to do,” added Penn, who shot to fame in army cadet movie Taps, alongside Tom Cruise, in 1981.

The actor concluded: “I don’t know the solution. I don’t know where it’ll go, but I would not be allowed to play that role today. That’s certain.”

Previously, in an interview with The New York Times, Penn described directors preferring gay actors for gay roles as a “timid and artless policy”.  Repeating his casting as Milk “could not happen in a time like this”, he insisted.

Penn is next set to direct a movie about murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

The gay casting debate has been rumbling on for a number of years, with stars such as Ripley‘s Andrew Scott, Rebel Wilson and A Very English Scandal‘s Ben Whishaw, as well as Doctor Who supremo Russell T Davies, all voicing their opinions.