Now, there is outrage once more, following Mark Ruffalo’s decision to cast Bomer as a transgender in his movie, Anything. The horror, the horror! What is the world coming to?
Heck, it’s like a man who can’t walk on water being asked to play Jesus.
If I were writing a film about the Son of God, I would insist that the casting director check out the individual’s credentials for the role. After the walking on water bit was established, I would insist that he fulfil other criteria essential to convince us that he is Jesus.
Was he born in a stable? Was his mother a virgin? Can he turn water into wine and wine into blood? Can he transform a couple of sardines and a baguette into a feast for 5000? Can he persuade a dozen fishermen to leave their families and go on a road trip? Most important of all, can he rise from the dead?
Unless the actor’s life completely resonated with the character I had written, he would not get the part.
Robert Powell would never have landed the part of Jesus had he not displayed all these qualities at the audition, and the fact that he is still with us is evidence that he really did rise from the dead. Rumors of a Second Coming have, however, been greatly exaggerated.
Similarly, Daniel Radcliffe had obviously served a long apprenticeship as a wizard before he landed the role of Harry Potter. How else could he have mastered all those tricks? And if bicycles were not really able to fly, what would be the point of watching ET?
The importance of art mimicking life to the letter provides a particularly pertinent point when it comes to casting gay men as straight and vice versa. Could David Hyde Pierce have delivered so convincing and hilarious a performance, lusting after Daphne in Frasier, if he were gay? Of course not. It was clearly something that only a full-blooded heterosexual hunk could have mustered.
Would How I Met Your Mother be remotely funny if it contained gay people purporting to be straight, all in the name of entertainment? How ridiculous would that be?
If people start pretending to be people they are not, where does that leave us as a society? It’s like telling someone they have license to be a chameleon, casting a spell over the lives of others to help them suspend their disbelief. What sort of a world would it be, if everyone went around kicking reality in the teeth?
Before long, you would have special schools set up to teach people the art of this deception. People might start paying to go and see it, even. They might start giving out awards for some people doing it better than others.
So, Mr Bomer, the first time round, I found it inconceivable that, having returned to New York to continue your work with the Feds, you could have convinced me that you spent your days in a basement, constructing wooden crucifixes on which to fix women with ropes and chains.
That is a job for a man with psycho tendencies. Someone who might conjure up the image of a hungry rodent in a woman’s vagina, feasting on her sexual organs to induce a slow death, for example. But you would have to ask Bret Easton Ellis about that.
Now, in this latest turn of events, I am supposed to believe that you are a man who has become a woman?
Whatever next! If this deception thing called acting ever takes off – stranger things have happened – I have no doubt you will be able to pull it off brilliantly, just as you would have had you been given the part of Christian Gray, and I will continue to pay good money to see it.
For the record, Mr Bomer, I think you would make a great Jesus.
You can turn water into wine, can’t you?