Well, the only thing that we leave out of the film is that the real Kynaston actually got married and had six children, after the Restoration ended. He was famously the boy-toy of the Duke of Buckingham, this aristocrat’s male mistress. Then suddenly a few years later, he’s a middle-class man with a wife and kids and doing supporting roles on the stage. He’s no longer a star, but he’s still acting and all that. In the stage version, we had a weird little epilogue that I wrote where you learned all that stuff. And audiences were often wildly shocked at the end to find out that he got married and had kids because so much of the stage time and film time is taken up with his homosexual relationships. So that’s not in the film. But obviously, there’s something ambiguous going on at the end because we suggest that there’s an affection between Kynaston and Maria.
Why did you decide to remove that from the film?
I think it simply would have been a weird fact to throw at the audience at the very end. I think would be like going to see “Casablanca” and just as Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walk off, a title comes up and says, “Rick was shot dead two days later.” And also, frankly so much of it is about the political gender sexual issues. So much of the time these days people want to pigeonhole and say homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, what have you. And I thought that by saying he got married and had kids at the end, there might be this weird hint that somehow he had turned straight – or something like that. Although I’m completely happy with him being bisexual and being still a bit confused at the end, I didn’t want anyone to think, “Well, you know, the love of a good woman has turned him straight.” That seemed a little cut and dried and not the message we wanted to send, if we want to send any message at all.
I never thought of him as being bisexual in the film. It just seemed he wanted to be adored and it didn’t matter so much the sex of the person who loved him.
That’s it. You’ve got it right, that’s precisely it. The fact that he has sex with men and with women, I suppose simply by the definition of the act makes him bisexual. But that’s it exactly. Whomever will worship him. Whomever will give him the time of day, frankly, he’ll be whatever that person needs him to be. And if it’s the women in the coach or if it’s the Duke or someone else, that’s where he goes. So yeah, sex follows love in this case and also love follows a kind of desperate need.
Why haven’t we seen this particular story on film before?
I guess Tom Stoppard didn’t get to it (laughing). To tell you the truth, when I bumped into the story of Kynaston when I was doing research I thought, “My God, I don’t know why any of these other guys haven’t already done it.” It just seemed to be screamingly obvious that someone should do something about it. I figured if it wasn’t an English guy it would probably have to be me.
There have been a couple of other plays about the general subject. There’s a play from a few years ago called “Playhouse Creatures” that’s about all the woman who have hit the stage. It’s how they try to bust into the profession. There’s a play called “Cressida” about boy actors during the Elizabethan period, when they’re all kids learning to be girls. So I mean, we’re part of a little subset but it’s still kind of murky for most audiences.
PAGE 3: Jeffrey Hatcher on Casting Billy Crudup and Claire Danes
