During a panel at the Toronto International Film Festival, George Clooney has called for male lead roles to be rewritten for women in order to address the huge imbalance in starring roles created for each gender. With only 12% of lead roles in blockbusters written for women in 2014, it is an issue that certainly needs to be addressed.
Woo, go Clooney, etc. But actually, the brainwave was originated by Sandra Bullock, who had called Clooney to ask whether he would rewrite the lead role of his upcoming political-comedy Our Brand Is In Crisis – a political advisor who was originally male and possibly to be played by Clooney himself – for her. The film was struggling to get out of the development stages when Bullock called, and the decision was made to rewrite the script, “The minute she called and said she wanted to play the role that had been written as a man,” Clooney says. The film has since been picked up for production and will be released this autumn.
“Once we realised that you could change it really easily, it made you realise that there are an awful lot of women’s roles that could be out there if people just started thinking in this way,” Clooney explained. It is certainly a growing trend among the world’s top female actors, with both Julia Roberts and Emily Blunt playing roles originally written for men in their upcoming films Secret in their Eyes and Sicaro.
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Photography Michael Vlasaty via Flickr