Try casting a white Blade and find out.
The Oscar Wilde plays were televised with a mixed cast. I didn’t like it – for me, it doesn’t work having members of the same family different, in a play where biological descent is important – but I thought that probably for an English audience it was less of an issue: my contacts with English society suggest that people of Caribbean or Pakistani background (including mixed families) are now fairly ‘ordinary’ in London, as their food is.
Not to suggest that the producers weren’t very pleased with themselves, just that the local audience perhaps didn’t have to stretch as far as I did.
As early as 1993 (that’s–my God, almost 30 years ago now!), Kenneth Branagh cast Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves as brothers in Much Ado About Nothing. It’s not such a new thing.
Total trivia derail: Robert Conrad’s son, playing tennis with a young Paul Thomas Anderson, got into a dispute that resulted in the latter throwing his racquet at the former.
Did the younger Conrad dare PTA to knock the tennis ball off his shoulder?
No, but Bill Murray did in a pretty good SNL ad where he does just that, as an emasculated Robert Conrad storms off, threatening to go get his dad.
Sucks it can’t be found on i-net.
Murray just laughs at him, slaps him around a little.
Whenever I chance on discussions like this, this scene forces its way into my mind (a great scene in a bad move, but everyone who’s made it through the PhD gauntlet will wince in sympathy).
“The Wild, Wild, West” was a western parody of the James Bond films: fantastic villains, strange technology, secret lairs…and the main character was oversexed.
…
Sorry that I can’t find the quote, but one reviewer wrote that the a big part of “The Odd Couple” was how the part was played as simply two men having to live together - without any indication of there being a gay relationship. But it probably helped that the two characters were usually at odds with each other.
I’ll just point out that Artemus [sic] had not only a feminine name, but that of a female goddess. (I won’t say from which mythology, because I’m trying to stay highbrow.) So, the implication might have been there. Alas, Artemis was a virgin goddess, so Artemus’s love was destined to go unrequited or, at least, unsatiated. Whether that was because Jim was so deeply closeted that he couldn’t unbutton his purple jacket and flowery waistcoat even in private, or because he was just into bad guys, like the less-suggestively named Dr. Loveless … well, we can only speculate.