Josh Gad says live-action Beauty and the Beast didn't 'go far enough' depicting gay character

Be our guest, if you will, on a journey back to the long-ago days of 2017, when no one had heard of COVID-19, Rex Tillerson was Secretary of State (remember him?), and we all thought Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast might feature a groundbreaking gay character.

As you may recall, that did not turn out to be the case, and star Josh Gad, looking back, readily admits that the film "didn't go far enough." In a new interview with The Independent, the actor, who played LeFou in the 2017 remake, discussed what director Bill Condon once referred to as an "exclusively gay moment": an extremely brief shot of LeFou dancing with another male character.

"We didn't go far enough to warrant accolades," Gad told the U.K. newspaper. "We didn't go far enough to say, 'Look how brave we are.' My regret in what happened is that it became 'Disney's first explicitly gay moment' and it was never intended to be that. It was never intended to be a moment that we should laud ourselves for, because frankly, I don't think we did justice to what a real gay character in a Disney film should be."

Condon, for his part, later walked back his remarks, stating that the moment had been "overblown" and that he did not want to "make a big deal of it." However, the moment did lead to at least one theater refusing to screen the film, as well as the threat of censorship from several countries.

Still, Gad added in his Independent interview, "If we're going to pat ourselves on the back, then damn it we should have gone further with that. Everybody deserves an opportunity to see themselves on screen, and I don't think we've done enough — and I certainly haven't done enough to do that."

Gad had recently been developing a Beauty and the Beast prequel series for Disney+, which would have reunited him with his costar Luke Evans, who played Gaston in the 2017 film. However, Disney pulled the plug on the series earlier this month, citing delays with creative elements and scheduling conflicts with the cast. (It's unclear whether the series would have made LeFou's sexuality more prominent.)

"We tried to make it all work but under the gun it wasn't meant to be… for now," Gad tweeted at the time. "These characters and this story will live on, but sometimes the best intentions & reality collide & nothing can be done."

Related content:

• Beauty and the Beast prequel series halted at Disney+: 'We tried to make it all work'
• Beyoncé turned down the live-action Beauty and the Beast, director says
• As a dad, I'm glad Beauty and the Beast features a gay character