Lion King Star Says He Played Timon as Gay
The Lion King star Billy Eichner has said he played the character of Timon with a gay sensibility.
Speaking to BuzzFeed he said: “I’m glad that [director] Jon Favreau kept the tradition of Timon being played by a gay actor, with a certain type of comedic sensibility, alive.”
When asked if he thought Timon and Pumbaa were more than just friends Eichner replied: “Timon and Pumbaa are different species — I don’t even think that’s ethically correct, you know, that they would be a couple in some way.
“I didn’t think about [Timon] being gay so much as I thought, ‘Well, I’m gay, and I have what some may consider a gay sensibility, and I’m going to bring that to the table’, just the way that Nathan did.
“I’m certainly not going to shy away from it. In fact, I lean into it more in my performances than I even do in my everyday life…
“…gay people always had to sort of search for the closeted gay character [in animated films], because there were no openly gay characters, and we were so thirsty for them.
“I think the way to correct that is to actually put gay characters in animated movies. I’m actually in the very early days of working on a project like that.
“One of the last frontiers for LGBT representation is animated family films.”
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