Actor Ted Levine apologized recently for his iconic turn as cross-dressing serial killer Jame Gumb in the 1991 horror classic “The Silence of the Lambs,” saying that it was “f*cking wrong” that the film had “vilified” the apparent gender confusion of his character.
Levine told The Hollywood Reporter that his intent had always been to play Gumb — nicknamed “Buffalo Bill” — as a “f*cked-up heterosexual man” despite the fact that the character dresses in women’s clothing, wears makeup, and skins his female victims in an effort to make himself a suit of female flesh.
“There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well,” he said. “We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.”
Levine said that when they were making the film — based on the 1988 Thomas Harris novel by the same title — he had not been particularly concerned, but that “over time and having gotten aware and worked with trans folks, and understanding a bit more about the culture and the reality of the meaning of gender — it’s unfortunate that the film vilified that, and it’s f*cking wrong. And you can quote me on that.”
“I didn’t play him as being gay or trans. I think he was just a f*cked-up heterosexual man. That’s what I was doing,” Levine explained.
Director Jonathan Demme offered a similar take on Buffalo Bill’s motivations, arguing during a 2014 interview that the character was drowning in self-loathing and that turning himself into a woman was a means of escape from who he was rather than an effort to become something he specifically wanted to be.
“He didn’t wish to be another gender. He didn’t really have a sexual preference. He loathed himself — he wanted to transform himself so that there was no sense of him in the ‘new’ him [and] becoming a woman … that was his method of doing it.”
“We were really loyal to the book. As we made the film, there was just no question in our minds that Buffalo Bill was a completely aberrant personality — that he wasn’t gay or trans,” producer Edward Saxon added. “He was sick. To that extent, we missed it. From my point of view, we weren’t sensitive enough to the legacy of a lot of stereotypes and their ability to harm.”
“There’s regret, but it didn’t come from any place of malice. It actually came from a place of seeing this guy. We all had dear friends and family who were gay. We thought it would just be very clear that Buffalo Bill adapts different things from society, from a place of an incredibly sick pathology,” he continued.
Despite the confusion surrounding Buffalo Bill, “The Silence of the Lambs” became the third film in Academy history to sweep all five major awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Director (Demme), and Best Screenplay (adapted). The other two films to do so were “It Happened One Night” (1934) and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975).
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