Straight Actors Who Nabbed Oscar Noms for LGBTQ+ Roles

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender is gold! At least if you're talking about those statues handed out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences every spring. Of course, this rule also does not apply to openly queer actors, who, as Ian McKellen noted in 2016, have never taken home acting's top prize. With queer actors Kristen Stewart and Ariana DeBose nominated in acting categories, they could change that and take home gold, however not for queer roles this time around.

Here's a list of straight actors who received Oscar nominations for playing LGBTQ+ characters.

George Sanders won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his turn as dandy theater critic Addison Dewitt in the classic All About Eve. Though never outright gay in the script, to many film scholars it’s the otherness of being gay that he recognizes in Eve Harrington that causes the two to team up.

Star! (1968) tells the real life story of the rise of broadway/movie star Gertrude Lawrence who at the beginning of the film, gets cast in London’s Calling, a new play penned by Noel Coward, who was brought to life for the film by Daniel Massey. Massey's portrayal of Coward, a gay actor/writer/composer/etc. known for his wit and flamboyance, garnered him his first and only Oscar nomination.

Lenny Bruce is brought to life in the Bob Fosse directed Lenny (1974). The story centers on Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the groundbreaking comic. But Valerie Perrine — who plays Bruce's bisexual wife Honey — turned in a riveting performance that earned her an Oscar nod.

Only When I Laugh (1981) tells the story of Georgia Hines, a divorced Broadway actress, who upon release from rehab for alcohol abuse, tries to put her life together. James Coco earned himself an Oscar nod, playing Jimmy Perino, a fabulous gay actor and one of Georgia’s best friends.

In 1984, John Lithgow earned his first Oscar nomination playing Roberta Muldoon, a transgender ex-football player, in the adaptation of John Irving’s The World According to Garp.

Tom Courtenay was nominated for an Oscar for his turn as Norman, an effeminate set dresser trying to get an aging veteran theater actor through a very difficult performance of King Lear in The Dresser (1983).

Longtime Companion (1989) told the story of a group of gay friends from 1981-1988, as the AIDS crisis brought panic and terror. The film was the first movie about AIDS to get a wide release and earned Bruce Davison an Oscar nod for his role.

Shug Avery, played by Margaret Avery, who was also nominated for Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

You wouldn't think that a film about a U.S. president would have a gay orgy in it, but alas, we have Oliver Stone’s JFK (1990). In it we have Clay Shaw, played by Tommy Lee Jones who was nominated for an Oscar for the role, engaging in a drug- filled sexcapade with several other men.

In 1997, Greg Kinnear was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role of Simon Bishop in As Good As It Gets. After being beaten up in an attempted burglary, Simon is left unable to take care of himself and calls upon his incredibly selfish, OCD neighbor — played by a cranky Jack Nicholson — for help.

A transgender man trying to find himself and navigate love in a small Nebraska town is the premise of Boys Don’t Cry (1999). The powerful film earned Hilary Swank her first Academy Award.

In A Beautiful Mind (2001) Russell Crowe plays John Nash, a real-life mathematician, who becomes unable to differentiate the real world from fantasy. In the biography of the same name, John Nash was described as bisexual, a fact that was left out of the biopic.

The 2002 film Frida, a biopic on acclaimed artist Frida Kahlo, produced an Oscar nomination for Salma Hayek in the titular role, and does not shy away from the artist's bisexuality.

Another Hours nominee was Julianne Moore, playing disappointed housewife Laura Brown who shares an intimate kiss with her neighbor before leaving her family behind.

Charlize Theron won an Oscar in 2004 playing bisexual Florida prostitute-turned-serial killer Aileen Wournos.

Felicity Huffman was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Bree in 2004's Transamerica, a transgender woman who learns she fathered a son who is now a hustler.

In Capote (2005), Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the titular character, the lauded In Cold Blood author who was openly gay when the subject was completely taboo.

Harvey Milk was a pioneer of the gay rights movement who became one of the nation's first openly gay elected officials. In 2008, Sean Penn won a best actor Oscar for playing him in the critically acclaimed Milk.

In 2009, Penelope Cruz was nominated for her second (and won her first) Academy Award playing Maria Elena, the fiery and tempestuous ex-wife of an artist who enters into a new relationship with the artist and his new girlfriend in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

A young dancer gets the lead role in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake but soon struggles to maintain her sanity in Black Swan (2010). Natalie Portman won a best lead actress Oscar for playing the dancer, Nina Sayers, who while maybe not gay definitely shows some bisexual tendencies in one particularly steamy scene.

In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011), Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual, pierced, and tattooed computer hacker helping a disgraced journalist find a wealthy man’s niece who disappeared 40 years earlier. Mara was nominated for best supporting actress for the performance.

Also nominated from Albert Nobbs was Janet McTeer, who played another woman posing as a man, a painter named Hubert Page. Page shows Nobbs another possibility besides the solitary life he was living; one with love and a family.

Alan Turing and his team of brilliant code breakers must race against time to turn the tide of of World War II in The Imitation Game (2014). Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was nominated for a best actor Oscar, was gay and treated reprehensibly by the British government.

Also nominated from Carol is Rooney Mara, who plays the aspiring photographer who meets Aird while working in a department store, dreaming of a better life.

Richard Jenkins was nominated in 2018 for his role of Giles in The Shape of Water. The closeted character, living in Cold War-era America, feels trapped in time between the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals he worships and the era of gay liberation that is just over the horizon.

As narrator of the film, Giles tells the modern-day viewer of the fairy tale he witnessed, involving a mute young woman, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), and the amphibious being she falls in love with. Giles, who faces job discrimination as well as rejection by a man he loves due to societal stigma, knows what it's like to be an outsider. It is this understanding that allows him to empathize with Elisa's romance and help her overcome its obstacles.

Melissa McCarthy was nominated in 2019 for Actress in a Leading Role for portraying the late lesbian writer Lee Israel in the (excellent) biopic Can You Ever Forgive Me? The film, based on Israel's memoir, shows how the out-of-work biographer coordinated an operation forging the letters of luminaries like Tennessee Williams and Katharine Hepburn, with the famed gay bar Julius' as her home base.

Rami Malek was nominated in the Actor in a Leading Role category in 2019 for his performance as the bisexual Queen front man Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. The film was popular at the box office, but it received criticism from some LGBTQ activists for its inaccurate portrayal of Mercury's sexuality and his battle with AIDS, as well as its problematic credited director, Bryan Singer.

Emma Stone was nominated in 2019 for Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance as Abigail Hill, an 18th-century social-climber who improves her station by seducing Queen Anne in The Favourite.

Mahershala Ali was nominated in the Actor in a Supporting Role category in 2019 for his performance as jazz pianist Don Shirley in Green Book. Shirley never came out in his lifetime. But the film depicts a real-life incident in which the musician just barely escaped being arrested for a same-sex encounter at a YMCA.

Bombshell investigates the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News that brought down Roger Ailes through the eyes of Charlize Theron’s Megyn Kelly and Nicole Kidman’s Gretchen Carlson. But it’s Margot Robbie’s composite character Kayla, who has a fling and a friendship with Kate McKinnon’s Jess, and who struggles with her sexual identity amid the toxic environment at Fox News who truly teases out the myriad complications of working there. 

Robbie, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for the role, spoke with The Advocate ahead of the film's premiere.

“Story-wise, it adds to the idea that they can’t come forward and be open and honest, and their jobs are on the line,” Robbie said.

Oscar and Emmy winner Viola Davis earned a Best Actress nomination for her immersive turn as queer blues legend Ma Rainey in renowned theater director George C. Wolfe’s film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). The film is set on a single day in a sweltering recording studio where the singer of early queer anthems like “Prove It on Me Blues” does battle with white male record executives during the era of the Great Migration when Black Americans fled the South for the North. Zola’s Taylor Paige plays Ma’s girlfriend Dussie Mae. Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman, Michael Pott’s and an Advocate cover star, Colman Domingo, also star.

For his second nomination in a queer role (The Imitation Game was his first), Benedict Cumberbatch plays a queer cowboy suffocating under the weight of his toxic masculinity in Jane Campion’s multi-Oscar nominated The Power of the Dog (2021). A macho man in chaps for much of the film, Cumberbatch’s Phil alternately torments his brother George’s (Jesse Plemons) new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her sensitive teen son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and heartachingly reveres and longs for the long-dead cowboy Bronco Henry, who appears to have once broadened Phil’s horizons.