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Meet the Gay Cruella Star Portraying Disney's First Major LGBTQ+ Role
Meet the Gay Cruella Star Portraying Disney's First Major LGBTQ+ Role
According to reports, John McCrea is poised to break a rainbow glass ceiling.
A critic spotted a groundbreaking gay character in Cruella.
Grace Randolph, a writer with Rotten Tomatoes, noted the history-making role in a tweet last Friday following an advanced screening.
"We have the 1st officially out and proud #Disney character in her gang!" Randolph tweeted along with a rainbow flag emoji.
"It's the character played by John McCrea," Randolph added in the Twitter thread. "He has several scenes and plays a very important role, including saving another character!"
\u201cI\u2019ve seen #Cruella...\n\nNow THIS is the kind of #DisneyPrincess I can get behind, darling \ud83d\udc8b\ud83d\udc85\n\nP.S. We have the 1st officially out and proud \ud83c\udff3\ufe0f\u200d\ud83c\udf08 #Disney character in her gang!\n\nP.S.S. I\u2019m rooting for Cruella \u2764\ufe0f Jasper \n\nEmbargo lifts 5/26\u201d— Grace Randolph (@Grace Randolph) 1621019340
In the past, McCrea has acted in several LGBTQ+ productions, including God's Own Country and Dracula. He also starred in the filmed 2018 stage version of Everybody's Talking About Jamie, the musical about a teen who becomes a drag queen.
In what will please some LGBTQ+ critics, McCrea is an out gay man who is not press-shy about his identity. "I fully realize as a young gay man myself that I have a responsibility to speak for those people in the audience who may feel much closer to the outcast," he told Broadway.com in 2017 about his Jamie role.
Cruella's May 28 premiere is good timing for Disney, which previously was slammed for casting a straight actor, Jack Whitehall, in a gay role in Jungle Cruise. Now McCrea will make history as the first actor to play a major LGBTQ+ role in a Disney production, following Lena Waithe's breakthrough lesbian character in Pixar's Onward.
While many Disney villains have been coded as gay in past animated films, this would be a first for the children's entertainment empire.
Watch the Cruella trailer below.
