After rejecting assertions of being “gender fluid,” actor Billy Dee Williams now says that Disney made a mistake by turning the iconic character Lando Calrissian into a pansexual for the “Solo: A Star Wars Story” movie, arguing that it may have hurt the film’s overall box office success.
“I think that’s the reason they didn’t have the success they could have had,” Williams told Rolling Stone. “Because they were going for something that was topical, instead of an adventure that’s far beyond those questions. If you’re talking about this huge, incredible story, why lock yourself into this tiny moment between a character like Lando and his robot friend?”
Last year, prior to the release of “Solo,” screenwriter Jonathan Kasdan confirmed that Lando was a pansexual, meaning someone who swings for all different sorts of teams.
“There’s a fluidity to Donald and Billy Dee’s [portrayal of Lando’s] sexuality,” Kasdan told the Huffington Post at the time. “I mean, I would have loved to have gotten a more explicitly LGBT character into this movie. I think it’s time, certainly, for that, and I love the fluidity – sort of the spectrum of sexuality that Donald appeals to and that droids are a part of.”
“He doesn’t make any hard and fast rules. I think it’s fun,” Kasdan said. “I don’t know where it will go.”
Kasdan also indicated that the movie dropped hints about sexuality in the “Star Wars” universe and how it differs from our world.
“There’s a line that [Jon Favreau’s character, Rio] has where he’s asking Han about the girl that he left behind, and he says, ‘Does she have big teeth?’” Jonathan Kasdan explained. “It’s a joke in the movie, but we did want to hit on this idea that people’s ideas of what they’re attracted to all over the galaxy are very, very different and not exactly as set as ours are.”
“Solo” went on to drastically underperform at the box office.
Actor Billy Dee Williams made headlines last week when he told Esquire that he likes to refer to himself in both the masculine and the feminine. However, when social liberals interpreted his comments as being indicative of some gender-fluid identity, Williams rebuked them.
“What the hell is gender fluid?” Williams told The Undefeated. “But what I was talking about was about men getting in touch with their softer side of themselves. There’s a phrase that was coined by Carl G. Jung, who was a psychiatrist, who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and they had a splitting of the ways because they had different ideas about the … what do you call it? Consciousness. Unconscious. It’s collective unconsciousness. But he coined a phrase that’s, ‘Anima animus.’ And anima means that is the female counterpart of the male self, and the animus is the male counterpart of the female.”
“So, that’s what I was referring to,” Williams continued. “I was talking about men getting in touch with the female side of themselves. I wasn’t talking about sex, I wasn’t talking about being gay or straight. People should read [Jung]. I mean, it would be an interesting education for a lot of people.”
“No, no, no, I’m not gay – by any stretch of the imagination,” he added. “Not that I have anything against gay people. But personally? Not gay.”