Can Hollywood survive another 10 years of wokeness?

From increased queer representation to films with casts of colour, the movie business has come a long way in the past decade, but it can’t stop there, writes Alexandra Pollard

Last year’s ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ was the first major film to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in a modern setting since 1993 (Getty)

Joker director Todd Phillips has made four attempts to make a good comedy this decade. The films – Due Date, The Hangover Part II, Project X and The Hangover Part III – failed in that regard, each more spectacularly than the next. The culprit? Society, apparently.“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he told Vanity Fair this year. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore – I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’”

Booksmart, Game Night, Long Shot, Blockers, Toy Story 4, Girls Trip and Paddington 2 – all made in the past few years, with generosity and a whole lot of wit – would probably refute the idea that comedies “don’t work anymore”. But there is some truth in Phillips’ words: society has evolved so quickly over the past 10 years that cinema has often had to scramble to keep up.

In large part, this has been a good thing. Social media has greatly increased accountability; anyone, from anywhere in the world (unless they’ve been living in Iran for the past few months), can make their feelings known if they are offended by a choice made by Hollywood. Which means that films can’t so easily get away with thinly drawn female characters or LGBT+ people; cisgender people can’t expect to take on trans roles without some pushback, and white people can no longer barrel into roles written for people of colour and expect to get away with it.

No one batted an eyelid when the makers of 2011’s Drive cast Carey Mulligan as a woman who, in the source material, was written as Latin. Or when Ben Affleck won an Oscar in 2012 for playing a half-Mexican CIA officer in Argo. At that point, few people even knew what the term whitewashing meant. But by the middle of the decade, the tide had started to turn.

Take Emma Stone, who played a character who was supposed to be one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Hawaiian in 2015’s Aloha, despite being 100 per cent white herself. By then, Twitter was prevalent enough that the Asian and Hawaiian community could make their feelings on the matter known. And when the Media Action Network for Asian Americans also criticised the decision, the film’s director Cameron Crowe apologised. As did Stone – very publicly, and in fact quite sweetly – during this year’s Golden Globes. Presenter Sandra Oh announced that Crazy Rich Asians was “the first studio film with an Asian lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha”. And Stone – who was sitting in the audience – yelled, “I’m sorry!”

Speaking of Crazy Rich Asians, that film – released last year – was a huge leap forward for Asian representation. As Aloha and Ghost in the Shell (which cast white actor Scarlett Johansson as Japanese manga character Motoko Kusanagi​) demonstrated, Asian people have been ignored, sidelined and coopted over the years. In fact, an early prospective producer for Crazy Rich Asians even suggested that a white woman should be cast in the lead role. Thankfully, it went to Taiwanese American actor Constance Wu instead. “We are not supporting roles,” she told Time magazine. “We are stars on our own journey.” The film made just under $240bn at the box office.

Its enormous critical and commercial success helped put paid to the all-too-common idea that actors of colour are not bankable – an idea propounded by directors such as Ridley Scott as recently as 2014. “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such,” he said, justifying his decision to cast white actors as Middle Eastern characters in his 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings. It was a profoundly flippant, not to mention offensive, comment. And since it was made, Egyptian American actor Rami Malek and Israeli actor Gal Gadot have led two of the most successful films of the past few years (the former Bohemian Rhapsody, the latter Wonder Woman).

Emma Stone played a character who was meant to be a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese in the film ‘Aloha’ (Getty)

Queer representation on film has also improved this decade. Not only are we getting sensitive depictions of people coming to terms with their sexuality – Pride (2014), Carol (2015), Moonlight (2016), God’s Own Country (2017), Princess Cyd (2017), Call Me By Your Name (2017), Love Simon (2018) – but queer people are allowed storylines where their sexuality is incidental. Mainstream hits such as Deadpool (2016), Booksmart (2019) and Charlie’s Angels (2019) featured non-straight characters whose sexuality was not where their identity began and ended.

We’ve come a long way since Ang Lee’s beautiful gay romance film Brokeback Mountain (2005) was seen as vaguely scandalous – but there is work to be done. For one thing, franchises such as Marvel still ignore the existence of LGBT+ people, and this has hardly improved as the decade has progressed. Ahead of the release of this year’s Avengers: Endgame, directors Joe and Anthony Russo boasted that a gay character would appear in their film. But when it came out, the character was unnamed, inconsequential to the story, and on screen for just a few seconds. It followed Disney’s first ever “exclusively gay moment” – in which Beauty and the Beast’s LeFou danced (very chastely) with a man.

Tessa Thompson, who plays the canonically bisexual Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnorok and Avengers: Endgame, tried to make sure that her character’s sexuality was depicted on screen. She even persuaded Ragnorok director Taika Waititi to film a scene in which a woman walks out of her bedroom. Even that ended up being cut.

Thompson knows the importance of queer representation because she is non-straight herself – and it is a rare thing in Hollywood for queer characters to be played by openly queer actors.

When Jack Whitehall was cast in the forthcoming Disney film Jungle Cruise, as the studio’s “first openly gay character”, the news sparked as much censure as celebration. Actor Darren Criss recently vowed to turn down queer roles in the future for fear of being “another straight boy taking a gay man’s role”. But Ben Whishaw wasn’t on board. “I really believe that actors can embody and portray anything,” said the British actor, who is himself gay, “and we shouldn’t be defined only by what we are.”

Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos starred as lovers in the film ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ (Getty)

Ellen Page sees things a little differently. All through the Noughties and into this decade, the Oscar-nominated Juno star had been in the closet. But in 2014, she became one of the few people in Hollywood to come out as gay, paving the way for a host of younger actors – Kristen Stewart, Ezra Miller, Alia Shawkat, Sasha Lane, Amandla Stenberg – to be open about their sexuality too. Before coming out, she hadn’t played any gay characters on screen. But since then, she has played several – in films such as Freeheld (2015) and My Days of Mercy (2019). “Honestly, if I played gay characters for the rest of my career, I’d be thrilled,” she says.

“I do really think, ideally, anyone should be able to play a perfect part for them,” Peppermint – the first transgender woman to create a major role in a Broadway musical, Head Over Heels, – told Vice this year. “But right now, gay, trans and queer people need to participate in the telling of their own stories. Hollywood has a terrible history of creating movies and making money off the experiences of marginalised people, without letting them have any input in the process.” This is an issue with no clear-cut answer – but that we are having the conversation at all is surely a mark of progress.

Right now, gay, trans and queer people need to participate in the telling of their own stories. Hollywood has a terrible history of creating 

This has also been the decade of men being held to account for their poor behaviour. The #MeToo movement began through unpleasant necessity: the high-powered Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual coercion, harassment and assault by over 80 women, the allegations dating back decades. Weinstein will surely never work in Hollywood again, but the ripple effects of these revelations reached far beyond just one man. The term “Weinstein effect” has been coined, referring to a global trend in which people, particularly women, feel increasingly empowered to come forward to accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct. And the Time’s Up movement was launched in its wake, a legal defence fund to fight sexual harassment – particularly for lower-income women – and advocate for gender and pay parity.

There is a gradient to poor behaviour. Making an inappropriate comment onset is not the same as sexual assault, and though both deserve to be called out, there are those who believe that a growing “one strike and you’re out” culture is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When I interviewed Rosanna Arquette earlier this year, she said, “Calling out behaviour that feels lechy and creepy, and being able to voice that, and then someone saying, ‘I’m really sorry, I’m going to change my behaviour’, we have to applaud those men that are willing to do that, because that’s how change is going to happen.”

The relative success of this year’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood proves that Quentin Tarantino – a man whose work has long courted controversy, not least for its over-abundant use of the N-word – has managed to survive his own scandal. In 2018, Uma Thurman said that he had forced her to perform an unsafe stunt on the set of Kill Bill, resulting in a car crash that could have killed her. It was, she said, “dehumanisation to the point of death”. She also said that during the shoot Tarantino had performed some of the film’s violent moments himself, “spitting in her face in the scene where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it and choking her with a chain in the scene where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it”.

There is surely no way a director could do that now – at least, not without the very clear consent of everyone involved. Indeed, in the past few years, intimacy coordinators have become increasingly common. Their job is to oversee the planning, preparation and performance of sex and nude scenes, and ensure that the actors feel comfortable at every stage. “The last six months have seen a huge uptick,” Elizabeth Talbot, who runs Intimacy Directors International in the UK, told The Guardian this year. “It’s no secret that our industry was very unsafe for actors. My goal is that you don’t have to feel someone else’s genitals at work if you don’t want to; we make sure we advocate for actors and actresses when they feel too vulnerable or unsure to do it themselves.”

Hopefully, this means that what happened on the set of 2011’s Blue is the Warmest Colour will not happen again. The film was one of the best of the decade, and its leads, Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, were so brilliant that when the film won the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival jury insisted that it be split between the director Abdellatif Kechiche and the two actors. But a few months later, Seydoux revealed that the seven-minute-long sex scene took 10, gruelling days to film, was unchoreographed and was a “horrible” experience. “He really wanted us to give him everything,” added Exarchopoulos, saying there was a “kind of manipulation which was hard to handle”. Kechiche did not take kindly to their words, but one hopes he has learnt his lesson since.

This decade has seen perhaps more changes in cinema than any before it. And those changes are surely for the better, no matter what Todd Phillips says.