Aaron Sorkin: ‘I Don’t Use Twitter as My Casting Director’

Right on! Score one for Sorkin!

"Spanish and Cuban are not actable," he told the Sunday Times Culture Magazine. "If I was directing you in a scene and said: 'It's cold, you can't feel your face.' That's actable. But if I said: 'Be Cuban.' That is not actable. Nouns aren’t actable."

"It's heartbreaking and a little chilling to see members of the artistic community re-segregating ourselves," he also said.

"Gay and straight aren’t actable. You can act being attracted to someone, but you can't act gay or straight," he continued."So this notion that only gay actors should play gay characters? That only a Cuban actor should play Desi? Honestly, I think it's the mother of all empty gestures and a bad idea."

Bardem previously responded to the pushback about his casting in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying that portraying a character he is not is part of his job as an actor.

"Why does this conversation happen with people with accents?" he said in the interview published Dec. 15. "Where is that conversation with English-speaking people doing things like 'The Last Duel,' where they were supposed to be French people in the Middle Ages? That’s fine. But me, with my Spanish accent, being Cuban?"

"It would be nice if there were enough LGBT roles that anyone could play them because there wasn't any scarcity of representation," Jane Ward, a gender and sexuality studies professor at the University of California, Riverside told USA TODAY November 2020. "However, that's not the case."

Straight actors playing queer roles is "something that we give certain people a pass for," says journalist Tre'vell Anderson, former director of culture and entertainment at Out magazine.

According to GLAAD's 2021 Studio Responsibility Index, 10 out of 44 major studio films contained LGBTQ characters.

Twitter users had much to say about Sorkin's latest comments.

"It's heartbreaking to see a screenwriter I was a fan of be deliberately obtuse towards people's valid criticisms," writer and MTV movies host Hannah Flint tweeted.

"I'm starting to think Aaron Sorkin, a famously rich straight white prima donna cisgender man, doesn't understand the struggle of being a gay/queer or poc in acting," another user wrote.

Another user tweeted: "Aaron Sorkin doesn't get it. There are Cuban actors out there who would have loved to play this role. I mean, nothing against Bardem."

Billy Eichner, writer, actor, and executive producer, spoke out on this last point on Twitter.

"Completely ignorant of how Hollywood has treated its openly LGBTQ+ actors for a century," he wrote. Eichner has spoken about how the industry has forced performers to stay closeted in a variety of years. "Talking about shit he doesn't fully comprehend. Scared that Hollywood isn't (entirely) ruled by straight men anymore. Go write yourself a 'walk and talk' back into the past. Merry Christmas!"

How long till he apologizes to the Cancel Crazies?

Sorkin is right. The less woke nonsense film makers pay attention to, the better movie making will be. Unfortunately, most of them cave in to the pressure.

I hate to break the news to Aaron Sorkin, but ANY random person he hired off the street would probably do a better job casting roles in his movies than his current casting director. As I noted, I'm glad she wasn't around in his early days or Rick Moranis would have been cast as Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men.