The talented mr ripley gay
Going to the Matt
Matt Damon’s interview w/ The Advocate (18 January 2000)
[During promotion for The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon gives an interview to LGBT magazine The Advocate. He discusses his approach to playing Tom Ripley, gay relationships, and the scrutiny around his friendship with Ben Affleck. I first came across excerpts from this fascinating interview when browsing the Damon Affleck Slash Archive using the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, but my gratitude goes to @kampedupkinks-blog for pointing me toward the occupied issue. Full transcription under the cut.]
Gay people, characters, and subjects are nothing new to Oscar winner Matt Damon. Here’s his whole unexpected attitude on it all.
By Brendan Lemon
As the title character in the luxurious, homoerotic modern movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon is obsessed with trying on a rich friend’s clothing, looking for the right well-tailored suit to indicate his evolving view of himself. Ever since the Boston buddy picture Good Will Hunting won him a screen-writing Oscar and established him as a movie star two years ago, the actor has been redefining
The Talented Mr. Ripley: Is Tom Gay?
Summary
- Tom Ripley's sexuality is heavily implied in the 1999 movie adaptation, with scenes exhibiting subtextual homoerotic tension between him and Dickie Greenleaf, as well as discomfort with heterosexual relationships.
- The character of Tom Ripley has been interpreted as a metaphor for the closeted experience, with his ability to adopt multiple personas representing the need to hide one's true self due to societal pressures.
- The upcoming miniseries adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley has the opportunity to explore Tom Ripley's sexual identity more directly, with Andrew Scott's casting as an openly gay player potentially bringing a more authentic understanding to the character. This representation could resonate with contemporary audiences and provide a more inclusive portrayal.
The Talented Mr. Ripley leaves audiences guessing after every scene, but the only unanswered question is whether or not Tom is same-sex attracted. The subversive period piece
Do Gay, Be Crime: The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)
When you're both on a boat and one guy's skull gets smote, that's-a Ripley
First things first: This is not just about The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s about The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley (Netflix, 2024) and Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023) and Influencer (Kurtis David Harder, 2022) and… Ripley, like Alienand Fatal Attraction, has become its own genre. Its core elements — poor young man meets rich boy; homosexual boy meets straight boy; poor gay boy falls in love with wealthy straight boy, then murders him, then takes over his life — hold entered the collective unconscious and spawned a half-dozen mutations.
That said, Minghella’s was the first Ripley I knew, and the only one I knew for a long time, so I’ll re-acquaint you with it before continuing.
Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a working-class kid with a talent for impersonation and forgery, who is mistaken for a Princeton pupil by wealthy boatmaker Herbert Greenleaf. Mr. Greenleaf’s son, Dickie, has shipped off to Italy (on a boat) and refused to return to the states (on a different boat) because he is too busy (on his
Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s
Published in a occasion when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy finish. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as understanding, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American world worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to consent that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a revolutionary text in the conservative 1950s. The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it materialize far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy finish. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a
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