During a 2012 interview with Passport Magazine, Beauty and the Beast director Bill Condon said that he wishes he could “rip pages out of the Bible” as soon as he arrives in a hotel room, though, to Condon’s disappointment, there are usually none available.
“What is first thing you do when you get into a hotel room?” asked Passport Magazine, in a now-archived interview.
“I wish I could say I’m like Ian McKellen and immediately go rip pages out of the Bible, but there don’t seem to be bibles in the hotel rooms I stay in these days,” answered Condon. “So it’s figuring out how to get online.”
Condon’s latest resurfaced remarks are sure to not sit well with already disillusioned potential movie-goers, particularly of the religious strain. The openly gay director generated controversy last month when he announced that his adaptation of the 1991 classic would feature Disney’s first “exclusively gay moment.”
As previously reported by The Daily Wire, LeFou, who is Gaston’s sidekick in the flick, will reportedly “explore his sexuality and feelings” for Gaston.
“LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston,” Condon told Attitude magazine.
“He’s confused about what he wants. It’s somebody who’s just realizing that he has these feelings,” added the director.
In the remake, LeFou is played by actor Josh Gad, who Condon says “makes something really subtle and delicious” out of the character’s sexuality. In the end, there is a “nice, exclusively gay moment,” he said.
Displeased with the gay messaging, conservative groups have already moved to boycott the film.
LifeSiteNews, for instance, has already garnered nearly 130,000 signatures on their petition calling for a boycott of the film and it’s “LGBT agenda.”
Colorado Christian University has also called for pro-traditional family Americans to abstain from the film. “We will not allow you to bully us into going against our Biblically-based beliefs in natural marriage, and we will certainly not let you circumvent us as leaders of our families to force these beliefs on the impressionable young minds of our children,” says the CCU petition, addressed to Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Allen Iger.