by Actor Ben Whishaw has opened up about his experience in the acting industry as a queer man, and he deemed being openly gay “unsustainable” early in his career.
Speaking newly to the Sunday Times Style, the actor, who came out as gay in 2014, discussed first his experience playing photographer Peter Hujar in the 2025 American biographical drama, Peter Hujar’s Day.
“I’m taken by gay characters not having to be noble, flawless or setting a good example — instead behaving in ways that are ambiguous, morally dubious, ambivalent. Messy. That’s intriguing.”
Ruminating on the change in the types of queer roles available to him now, as opposed to when he was starting out, Whishaw added, “There were very few gay actors who were out when I started and so being out didn’t seem like a sustainable position to be in.”
He continued, “But now it kind of is sustainable, but, actually, it opens up so many questions I have for myself. Because, again, part of me still thinks that it is nobody’s business.”
In terms of the characters on offer in the industry, Whishaw agreed with the interviewer’s theory that, in his words, “for a long time, there were so few stories about those characters that they were a bit overloaded. As in, ‘This is the one gay story!’ That pressure is a bit too much to bear, it had to say too much for a group.”
In 2021, Whishaw, who played the role of technology whiz kid Q in Spectre, Skyfall, and Quantum of Solace, suggested that having a gay actor play James Bond would be “quite an extraordinary thing”. He added, “I really believe that we should be working towards a world where anyone can play anything and it would be really thrilling if it didn’t matter about someone’s sexuality to take on a role like this”.
