Rooney Mara has spoken out at a New York Film Festival panel to say that “it’s time” for films to deal with the LGBT experience.
“There’s a lot of people who go through that experience and there aren’t a lot of films in the past [that] have dealt with it,” Mara said at a screening of her upcoming film, Carol, about the romance between a rich society woman who is married to a man (Cate Blanchett) and a shop girl (Mara) in New York in the 1950s, which is based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.
Speaking from the audience, comedian Sandra Bernhard added that, “When people become more comfortable with things shifting, whether it’s race or sex or religion or gender, they make movies about it, TV shows, music,” concluding, “That’s a good thing. Any time you make a . . . great piece of art, it opens people up.”
Several high-profile films this year are dedicated to LGBT stories, with i-D cover star Elle Fanning starring in About Ray, about a transgender boy; the controversial Stonewallfeature that has been accused of whitewashing and straight-washing the story of the gay rights movement; and The Danish Girl, in which Eddie Redmayne plays trans pioneer Lili Elbe.