Robert Pattinson Joins Legion Of Straight Actors Who Play Gay

When an actress wants to be taken seriously (and seriously considered for an Oscar) she’ll often play ugly, i.e., Charlize Theron in “Monster.”  For men, the equivalent is playing gay. When a pretty boy wants to be known as an actor, rather than eye candy, he takes on such a role to show that he can do more than look good and that he’ll go the distance for his “craft.” Robert Pattinson does this in his upcoming movie, “Little Ashes.” In the film, Pattinson plays Salvador Dali in the story of the friendships between him and filmmaker Luis Bunuel and writer Federico Garcia Lorca (with whom he has a relationship). I went to a screening a couple weeks ago, and while there is a lot of sexual tension, there wasn’t as much sex as Pattinson has been making it sound like. In an interview with GQ, he said:

“Here I am, with Javier [Beltran], who plays [Federico García] Lorca, doing an extremely hard-core sex scene, where I have a nervous breakdown afterward. And because we’re both straight, what we were doing seemed kind of ridiculous. ... And it wasn’t even a closed set. There were all these Spanish electricians giggling to themselves.”

Either Pattinson is trying to make more of the gay sex than there is for publicity’s sake, or I fell asleep during this part (I don’t recommend this movie, even to the Pattinson-obsessed). Click through to see other hot actors who have played gay early in their careers and gone on to, um, bigger things.