Marc Maron Wanted 'More Gayness' In Role Opposite Hugh Jackman

It used to be that actors would avoid queer roles for fear of the association hurting their careers, but Marc Maron recently opened up about rejecting a part because it actually wasn’t gay enough.

Ray Romano stopped by the actor’s WTFpodcast earlier this week, and the conversation eventually turned to the film Bad Education, a 2019 TV movie about a real-life school district superintendent (Frank Tassone, played by Hugh Jackman) who became involved in the largest school embezzlement scandal in American history.

“I thought I was auditioning for the role you had,” Maron told the Everybody Loves Raymond star, who played school board president Bob Spicer in the movie. “I read the script and I said, I don’t want to do it. It was for Hugh Jackman’s boyfriend. He’s got nothing in there.”

In real life, Tassone had both a secret domestic partnership and a boyfriend when the scandal broke, and was not publicly out as queer at the time. In the movie, the boyfriend was depicted as a former student at his school (something Tassone says was not true).

The boyfriend role ultimately went to Rafael Casal, but Maron made it clear his disinterest was not because he didn’t want to play a gay character. In fact, he thought the relationship between the two should have been more played up.

“I said, ‘If I’m going to be gay in a movie, [Jackman] would be a good guy to be gay with, but there didn’t seem to be much to the role other than that,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll wait to be gay when there’s more gayness.’”

On the one hand, it’s wonderful to see actors not fret over playing queer characters as they once would have. And if that translates into more queer roles being written, even better. On the other, sometimes it feels like we have to remind straight people that having casually queer characters is just as normal as having casually straight characters, and just as important as having roles where queer sexuality is front and center.

But in this case, it seems like Maron’s issue was ultimately just that the part didn’t offer him much of a challenge as an actor, and that’s a completely understandable reason to pass. And if he and Jackman want to find another movie in which to play lovers, there’s definitely an audience for it.