Dylan O’Brien has stepped into the casting debate around straight actors playing queer characters, saying he relied on trust and direct feedback from James Sweeney while making Twinless. In comments circulated this week and highlighted by Deadline, O’Brien said “permission goes a long way” and credited Sweeney, who is gay, with helping him calibrate performance choices rather than defaulting to a neutral approach.
O’Brien’s remarks came from a Dazed interview tied to renewed attention on the film, where he plays twins Roman and Rocky, one straight and one gay. He argued that some straight actors approach queer roles by sanding off specificity out of fear of backlash, which can read as false on screen. O’Brien said Sweeney gave him room to “go crazy” and then pull back if it stopped feeling truthful, framing the collaboration as a practical guardrail rather than a blank check.
Sweeney echoed that logic, saying he pushed O’Brien toward choices that felt “fluid with masculinity and femininity,” and he described the characters as heightened yet emotionally grounded. Another O’Brien anecdote from earlier publicity has resurfaced alongside the new quotes: he said Sweeney sometimes flagged takes as “too straight” during moments meant to register as gay, a shorthand the pair used to keep intention clear on set.
The exchange lands inside a long-running industry fault line. Advocates for like-for-like casting point to opportunity gaps for LGBTQ performers, while others warn against treating sexuality as a required credential for employment.
A recent Vanity Fair examination of the issue noted the mismatch between awards attention for straight actors playing queer characters and the scarcity of openly LGBTQ performers receiving comparable institutional recognition, and it also drew a hard distinction often cited by groups such as GLAAD: casting cis actors as trans characters has become a separate, higher-stakes controversy with fewer accepted defenses.
