Why?
Well, yeah. Don’t you?
There factually aren’t that many roles that aren’t about gender because:
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There aren’t almost no productions without some sort of romantic subplot shoehorned
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Most productions make overt efforts to highlight sexual availability of the actors. Since I’m not asexual, I of course notice the sex of the actor if it is being played up.
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Genders are meaningfully and measurably different in their abilities, psychology and so forth. This is further reinforced by social factors. As such, in many situations the way that a woman would react and how she will perform will quite different to man. If the audience sees a man acting like they expect a woman to act or vice versa it forces them to notice the sex of the actor and wonder why. For example, a realistic movie set in modern America where the lead responds to stress at work by breaking down and crying when they tell their spouse about it is gender neutral. A movie where the lead breaks down when telling their friends about it in a coffee shop becomes jarring and unrealistic if the lead is male. It totally changes the view of the character from “typical American like millions I’ve met” to “Atypical and defining, variant personality trait”. This is even more applicable to historical dramas.
But yeah, in those tiny minority of productions, like Alien, where there is no romance, no overt sexuality and either no gender specific behaviour or a good reason why that behaviour is co-opted, then the gender of the actor becomes quite irrelevant after about 5 minutes. Once it becomes clear that it’s not going to be a focus of the role then of course I forget it.
Of course this is much more common with race because none of the points I make above apply to race. I don’t expect a Black man to react differently to a White man or an Indian woman to react differently to a Black woman. I don’t expect the typical White person to be stronger or more physically aggressive, and I don’t find Mongoloid people sexually attractive and Casucasian utterly unattractive.
But yeah, on the rare occasions when I watch a production where sex is irrelevant, of course I forget about sex of the actors within minutes. It’s totally unimportant to the plot.