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The Director of Luca Says He Considered Making the Disney Film Gay
The love story was almost more than subtext, Enrico Casarosa reveals.
Luca, Disney's dreamy film following two young sea monsters in the Italian countryside, and before it even premiered last year, there were rumors that the film was gay.
The speculation made sense. The story follows two boys, Luca and Alberto, hiding a secret and exploring a small Italian city that hunts their kind. Their existence as outsiders bonds them together in a rather heartwarming way, and the location also immediately garnered comparisons to Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name.
The idea of these characters being gay was quickly squashed by director Enrico Casarosa. "I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things," he said at the time. "This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world."
Almost a year later, Casarosa admits that even though it didn't make it to the film, a gay romance was at one point on the table for Alberto and Luca.
“We talked about it,” he told The Wrap. “I think the reason probably we didn’t talk about it as much and, to a certain degree, we’re slightly surprised by the amount of people talking about romance, is that we were really focusing on friendship and so pre-romance. But it is a kind of love, right?”
Even still, the expression of love between the boys certainly feels queer at times. “There’s a lot of hugging and it’s physical and my experience as a straight man certainly wasn’t that," Casarosa continued.
At the end of the day, his team had race in mind more so than sexuality when creating the film but he's glad different communities can see themselves in the story. “I love that the metaphor is reading in all these different ways,” he said. "How many different ways as kids we can feel like outsiders? It’s so various. And my version was certainly, we were two geeks, losery, and so it’s not where I was coming from but it’s so wonderful and even more powerful for the LGBTQ+ community who has felt so much of as an outsider, right, where this is so real and stronger than my experience."
Not quite the Call Me By Your Name romance, but we'll take it!
Following in the footsteps of the film's mantra of being brave, the voice of Alberto, Jake Dylan Grazer, shared with fans that he was bisexual with his own, “Silenzio, Bruno!”
Taylor Henderson is a PRIDE.com contributor. This proud Texas Bama studied Media Production/Studies and Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, where he developed his passions for pop culture, writing, and videography. He's absolutely obsessed with Beyoncé, mangoes, and cheesy YA novels that allow him to vicariously experience the teen years he spent in the closet. He's also writing one!
Taylor Henderson is a PRIDE.com contributor. This proud Texas Bama studied Media Production/Studies and Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, where he developed his passions for pop culture, writing, and videography. He's absolutely obsessed with Beyoncé, mangoes, and cheesy YA novels that allow him to vicariously experience the teen years he spent in the closet. He's also writing one!
