Fans of the new Ghostbusters movie have speculated about Kate McKinnon’s character’s sexuality for months, but are we any closer to getting a major LGBT character in the franchise? Well, if you ask director Paul Feig, you’re going to get a pretty vague and open-ended answer that’ll be anything but definitive.
Ever since the first trailer came out, fans have latched onto Jillian Holtzmann, who is one of the movie’s highlights according to reviews. Holtzmann is eccentric, and some people quickly took her wink at Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert as a display of unabashed flirting. Add in a gun lick, and a new awakening occurred.
The Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato directly asked Feig about Holtzmann’s sexuality and she points out Holtzmann’s flirting with Gilbert throughout the film as an indicator. And while Feig grins and nods, he then offers a vague answer that appears to put the blame on Sony and shrugs.
“I hate to be coy about it,” he told the Daily Beast. “But when you’re dealing with the studios and that kind of thing…”
It’s the sort of thing we’ve seen in other properties with LGBT characters. It isn’t explicit, instead going for allusions so that a film or a TV show isn’t instantly barred from anti-LGBT countries. (Legend of Korra is one such example.)
Feig then praises McKinnon and says that some of Holtzmann’s characteristics are directly from her.
“You know, Kate is who she is and I love the relationship between Kate and Melissa’s characters,” he continued. “I think it’s a very interesting, close relationship. If you know Kate at all she’s this kind of pansexual beast where it’s just like everybody who’s around her falls in love with her and she’s so loving to everybody she’s around. I wanted to let that come out in this character.”
BONUS: I watched the original ‘Ghostbusters’ for the first time
H/T Gawker