Greg Berlanti Says Gay Execs Stopped Him From Casting Gay Actors

Greg Berlanti, the director of Love, Simon and creator of half the content currently on The CW, has revealed that one of the biggest obstacles to casting openly queer actors in his projects was…gay executives.

“Early on in my career there were gay execs and gay casting people who were the least likely to let me cast an actor they knew was gay in a straight part,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. "These were the individuals who knew how important it would be."

Berlanti’s push for inclusion has been well documented throughout his career.

The veteran showrunner was in charge of Dawson’s Creek when the groundbreaking kiss between Jack McPhee and Ethan aired — and famously threatened to quit if The WB wouldn’t let it happen.

“There hadn’t been a gay kiss that was romantic on primetime TV,” he told Vanity Fair in 2018. “There had been joke kisses, but there was never a romantic kiss between two character, let alone two high-schoolers.”

Berlanti currently has executive producer credit on all the superhero shows on The CW, and all of them have featured a good number of LGBTQ characters, recurring and one-off. 

The shows under his care, which also include The CW hit Riverdale, have cast a number of actors over the years that are either openly gay or subject to rumors about their sexuality, so does that mean things have changed?

Berlanti says he will know Hollywood has truly changed when “the majority of rooms I walk into — executive suites or writers rooms or production floors — look and feel like the rest of America.”

So we may still have a ways to go. But with people like Berlanti out there pushing the envelope to get more queer actors cast and queer characters represented on screen, we’re making progress.