Neil Patrick Harris interview for the Guardian
Sorry for being quiet on here lately – been a busy boy lately with my PhD starting, trips to Sitges with Duckie and Lisbon for Queer Lisboa film festival, and various other things going on. But here are details on a couple of recent pieces for the Guardian.
The first was an interview with Neil Patrick Harris, who I think is one of the most fascinating figures around in mainstream entertainment at the moment, as both super-out gay man and America’s sweetheart. (He also loves him some immersive theatre.) Unfortunately a quick phone interview on a temperamental transatlantic line isn’t the best way of getting into meaty subjects in depth but the article might still be of interest. Here’s the opening:
One night this spring, Neil Patrick Harris was wearing high heels, denim hotpants and glittery lip-gloss, talking about the injustices of being a rock’n’roll gender outlaw. As he drew breath, a voice shouted out: “I love you, Neil!” Harris spat back: “Who the fuck is Neil?” Harris was on stage, starring in the first Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a cabaret-style musical with a porous fourth wall. At that moment, Harris was Hedwig, and Hedwig likes the spotlight to herself. Still, the question lingers: who is Neil Patrick Harris? Read the full interview here.
The second piece was a response to The Imitation Game, the Alan Turing biopic that opened the London Film Festival this week. I didn’t have particularly high expectations of the film, which looks quite conventional in its form, but I really liked the way it emphasised Turing’s strangeness – his otherness, his queerness – implying that it was impossible to separate his tremendous achievements from his outlaw sexuality. Here’s the opening:
“Mother says I’m just an odd fish,” an adolescent Alan Turing tells a schoolmate in The Imitation Game, the film that opened the 2014 London film festival last night, 8 October. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the mathematician and war hero who came to a tragic end, it’s calculated to appeal to a mass audience – stirring score, lush photography, Keira Knightley as the not-quite-love-interest – and is already tipped to clean up in awards season. All the same, it goes out of its way to praise odd fish. In fact, by spotlighting Turing’s abnormality, celebrating it, and making clear its inalienability from his sexuality, it could be the queerest thing to hit the multiplex in ages. Read the full article here.
Worth checking out the comments after the Turing piece too. The word ‘queer’ still seems to get a lot of knickers in twists…
