Are straight directors qualified to tell gay stories on screen? The Australian actor-director Joel Edgerton didn’t think he was. At least, not when first reading Boy Erased: A Memoir, Garrard Conley’s account of his childhood experiences in gay conversion therapy. He knew it would make a compelling film, but he didn’t believe he was best placed to do it.
“I was like: fuck, this would be a great movie and I would love to be the one to do it. But I don’t think I can, simply because I’m not of the LGBTQ community,” he says. “I’d really started to think in the last couple of years a lot about representation – mainly in front of the screen.”
He optioned the book anyway, unable to shake it from his mind. He sought out Conley, spoke to survivors of conversion therapy, researched the infrastructure surrounding it, met with Conley’s abuser and then began a screenplay. Directing it became a less distant possibility. “It was like, I feel so passionate about it and I can’t get this out of my head.”
The resulting film follows Conley – Jared, played by Lucas Hedges – as he comes out to his mother (Nicole Kidman) and father (Russell Crowe), a Baptist preacher who convinces his son to enroll on a 12-day conversion therapy course. The film is largely set in Memphis at the real-life Love in Action, an “ex-gay” Christian ministry, run on screen by Edgerton as chief therapist Victor Sykes (a portrayal of the ministry’s former director, John Smid).
This is not Edgerton’s first film behind and in front of camera (four years ago, he made a psychological thriller called The Gift). Boy Erased was Oscar-tipped at the time of the first trailer, but has been largely overlooked since, despite positive reviews. But it is not the critics – or Oscar voters – Edgerton is worried about. “Obviously, I crave acceptance of that [LGBTQ] community,” he says. “To know that, with respect, I’m an ally who felt passionate enough to make it but I didn’t fuck anything up.”
To that end, he showed Conley every draft of the script and cut of the movie, and one of the first versions was sent to Glaad, the US organisation that monitors media coverage of LGBTQ issues. According to Edgerton, the organisation had only “one or two” concerns. One character removed from an early draft was a girl enrolled in the Love in Action programme after her parents caught her having an “indiscretion” with the family pet. “Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction,” says Edgerton. “I don’t want any chance for people to watch this movie and think we’re painting anyone of the LGBTQ community as deviant.”
Instead, he swung the other way, writing in Troye Sivan’s character, Gary: a composed, seemingly well-adjusted young gay man, savvy enough to tell the conversion therapists what they want to hear. “Love in Action was trying to make people into deviants,” adds Edgerton, “it was not our job as film-makers to do that.”
Another omission was that of a teacher who had assaulted his students. The character was originally included to highlight the institution’s practice of putting sexual abusers in the same group as young people (“I found that a fascinating indictment of the lack of care in the place”), but, on reflection, Edgerton felt time constraints inhibited an adequate exploration of the character.
Although you wonder how a gay director would have tackled the same issues, the fact that Edgerton is in some ways sanitising Conley’s memoir – rather than sensationalising it – perhaps demonstrates the increasing sensitivities straight directors have about how they tell queer stories. But by Edgerton’s own admission, his eagerness to avoid feeding into gay tropes or causing offence limited his writing.
“I also wish I could have been a smart enough writer to amplify a quality in Garrard that he described in the book: that, even at Love in Action, his way of coping, like many of us, was through humour, and he was a bit of a class clown,” he says. “My fear was that if I had Lucas cracking jokes and doing other stuff, it would give the wrong steer and diminish the tension. But I wonder if a better writer than me would have been able to include that as a builder of tension, rather than a diminisher.”
Edgerton’s preparation for the film took him to Texas, where he met Smid, the man he would be portraying. Smid joined the Love in Action leadership in 1986 and eventually became its director. He left in 2008 and publicly apologised three years later for the wounds the programme inflicted on vulnerable young people. At the end of the film – spoiler alert – it is revealed that Smid married another man in 2014.
Edgerton says Smid was “brave enough” to come to the film’s premiere in New York, and had originally offered himself up as a consultant during its production. Smid is not entirely sold on the telling of events according to Edgerton (although he has written in the Advocate that the film was “largely an accurate depiction of such programmes”).
“Looking back, Smid thinks things weren’t as bad and there wasn’t any shouting and all that,” says Edgerton. “But then it’s a case of ‘he said, she said’, I think. Garrard will tell you one thing. John might tell you another. My point of access is Garrard: he’s the guy I side with. But I appreciate John’s open-heartedness to reflect on something and to put his hand up and acknowledge that he made big mistakes.
“It was important from me to hear everybody’s point of view,” he continues, “because we were setting out to have an empathetic approach to everybody.”
Born in New South Wales, Edgerton was raised a devout Catholic – a “Ned Flanders kid” – in a town he describes as homophobic. Now agnostic (aside, he says, from some Catholic guilt), he internalised the town’s attitudes and had to learn to accept homosexuality later in life.
“I experienced bullying, but I also remember being in a group chastising somebody else and being a bully,” he says. “I’ve played both sides of that coin. And I don’t think anybody, or certainly I, never really knew what homosexuality was and yet we would all use these words, these slurs and these derogatory ways of teasing people. And so I’ve definitely been a part of that. Almost like that culture of behaviour that’s learned.
“You just treat anybody who’s different in a way that you single them out,” he continues. “You push them around. You do all that stuff. I was never aware of what any of that meant until I met my first gay man when I was 16.”
It wasn’t until he began drama school in Sydney that he developed meaningful relationships with gay men and acquired a “real deeper understanding of seuxality and its spectrum.
“I had been living in such a cloistered environment where everything is same-same and everybody’s pretending and nobody is doing anything out of the ordinary because it’s all about safety and not being singled out,” he says. “And I was like, OK, there’s a whole other world out here that I’ve never experienced and I’m getting my crash course in right now.”
One sequence in the film has met with disapproval: a graphic depiction of a sexual assault on Garrard by another student at his college. Some were frustrated that the only sexual act between two men in the film involved violence; others felt that the trauma of sexual abuse was ignored and the film lacked an adequate trigger warning (Edgerton says there is one in Australia).
“Most criticism of the film, I find fair,” he says. “I can appreciate that some people are like, ‘Well, where’s the love and tenderness?’ … but the first sexual experience you see in the film is one of violence. It happened to Garrard, it’s very much part of his story. It was a catalyst for him coming out. I wanted to be unflinching about it.
“It sounds trite, but it’s tough to please all of the people all of the time, especially when you’re going out on a limb on something that is extreme, like assault,” he adds.
Boy Erased scores points among many, however, for casting in its lead role an actor open about his own sexual fluidity. This at a time when the debate over whether straight actors should portray gay characters rages anew, following Darren Criss’s announcement that he would no longer take on gay roles, and awards acclaim for Rami Malek and Olivia Colman playing LGBTQ characters.
Edgerton is clearly aware of the sensitivities around the debate. And he recognises that, as a straight man, he will be under particular scrutiny. But he dances around the topic, referencing the backlash against Scarlett Johansson after it was announced she’d been cast as Dante “Tex” Gill, a trans man, and he refuses to commit to either side of the debate. “Maybe that movie will never get that made,” he says. “Is it better that the movie is made? And I’m not putting my opinion into this.”
Regardless, he’s happy with the Boy Erased casting in this regard, and fairly so: Hedges (who has previously stated he’s “not totally straight”) in the main role, while Xavier Dolan and Sivan (both out gay men) are cast in secondary roles as gay men. But does he think there is a still a broader issue with hiring LGBTQ people in Hollywood?
“Definitely not behind the scenes,,” says Edgerton. “A massive percentage of my behind-the-camera crew, heads of department, are from the LGBTQ community. And they don’t have any trouble getting employment, as far as I can tell.”
He hopes that Sivan’s performance in Boy Erased, as well as his various successes elsewhere, could help to inspire other actors to come out. “Troye has shown by example that, by being out and proud, there’s actually maybe an even bigger audience for you than the assumption that you would diminish your audience,” says Edgerton, who claims to “absolutely” know actors who aren’t out. “Clearly, I wouldn’t out anybody. But just the idea that that is your world – it’s almost like you’d rather take away your fame and just lead a normal life. I just can’t imagine what that would feel like. It shouldn’t exist in the acting community.”
Edgerton’s hopes for his own finished film are similarly virtuous: being used as an “icebreaker” between young LGBTQ people and their parents, or as a guide for those considering enrolling their children in conversion therapy. He is certainly keen for it to be wider educational piece: before the end credits, viewers are told that 700,000 LGBTQ Americans have undergone conversion therapy programmes, while only 14 US states have deemed it illegal. Ultimately, his ambition seems to be for the film’s cultural relevance to diminish.
“It would be nice if, as soon as possible, the film was really a museum piece so that people can watch it and go: ‘Oh shit, they used to do that kind of thing.’ Of course, it’s very naive to say that the persecution of LGBTQ people could ever just go away because conversion therapy is one thing,” he says, before invoking – ambitiously, but perhaps not unfairly – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. “The hope is that there was no point even making the film.”
• Boy Erased is released on 8 February in the UK.
