Since the reboot was announced, people have been losing their sh*t over the new Ghostbusters simply because the ghost-busting crew is an all female cast.
But what seems to freaking people out more, is the possibility of Kate McKinnon’s character being gay female Ghostbuster.
Sadly Ghostbusters director Paul Feig (also responsible for Bridesmaids and Freaks and Geeks) talks right around the subject in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato, even as he assures us that he hates doing so.
I hate to be coy about it. But when you’re dealing with the studios and that kind of thing… You know, Kate is who she is and I love the relationship between Kate and Melissa’s characters. I think it’s a very interesting, close relationship.
If you know Kate at all she’s this kind of pansexual beast where it’s just like everybody who’s around her falls in love with her and she’s so loving to everybody she’s around. I wanted to let that come out in this character.”
I wasn’t like, ‘And now you should wink at them.’ This is stuff that is coming out of Kate! That’s why you connect with those characters. They’re playing versions of themselves. That’s what makes a comedic actor fantastic, when that personality comes out. That’s why it’s so terrible when writer-directors say, ‘Stick to the script!’ Why would you hire these people who have these enormous personalities and then just cut them off?”
It seems that given the lack of LGBT characters in major movies, the dearth of out actors, the overall avoidance of gay subject matter in Hollywood, Feig & co., had the opportunity for easy diversity and forfeited it to take the safest route possible.
Feig is coy on the matter of his character’s sexuality, but elsewhere in the interview, he pats himself on the back for what his movie’s representation represents:
“I’m proud of the fact that you have four women starring in a movie and three of them are in their forties. I really credit [former studio head] Amy Pascal and Sony for letting me do this. It’s crazy that that would be a big thing now, and it’s sad that it is. But thank god.”