S ince the turn of the century, no fewer than 25 actors have been Oscar nominated for playing LGBT+ roles. Among them, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger for cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain (2005); Charlize Theron for Aileen Wuornos biopic Monster (2003); Sean Penn for political drama Milk (2008); Benedict Cumberbatch as computer programmer Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014), and Timothée Chalamet for the woozy, coming-of-age drama Call Me by Your Name (2017). Of those 25 actors, not a single one was openly queer.

The debate over whether that matters has been gaining steam of late. When Jack Whitehall was cast in the forthcoming Disney film Jungle Cruise, as the studio’s “first openly gay character”, the news sparked as much censure as celebration. Meanwhile, actors like Rachel Weisz – who last year played two excellent queer characters, in Disobedience and The Favourite – are facing more scrutiny than they might have done even a decade ago. But it’s a debate with no clear-cut answer.

Darren Criss, who won a Golden Globe for his role as Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, recently vowed to turn down queer roles in the future for fear of being “another straight boy taking a gay man’s role”. But Ben Whishaw wasn’t on board. “I really believe that actors can embody and portray anything,” said the British actor, who is himself gay, “and we shouldn’t be defined only by what we are."

It’s an argument that has been used time and again. “I see my task as not to tell the story I’ve lived,” Weisz recently told Gay Star News. “When I played Blanche DuBois on the stage, I’m not an alcoholic. And I’m not interested in sleeping with teenage boys! But that’s the character. So I see storytelling as me becoming people that I’m not.” Cate Blanchett, who played the eponymous Carol in Todd Haynes’ beautiful, Fifties-set lesbian romance, agrees. “I will fight to the death,” she said, “for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience.”

Cate Blanchett (right) with Rooney Mara in ‘Carol’: ‘I will fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience,’ Blanchett said

This perspective though, however valid, is missing some nuance. For one thing, being queer is an identity in a way that being an alcoholic, or sleeping with teenage boys, is not. It isn’t an experience someone has, or hasn’t had, but an essential facet of their identity – and no amount of research can truly encapsulate that. Growing up, whenever I stumbled upon a film or TV show with a queer female character – My Summer of Love, Kyss Mig, Show Me Love, Hollyoaks (options were limited) – I’d hope, without really knowing why, that the actor’s lived experience might also mirror my own.

“I do really think, ideally, anyone should be able to play a perfect part for them,” Peppermint – the first transgender woman to create a major role in a Broadway musical, Head Over Heels, – told Vice recently. “But right now, gay, trans and queer people need to participate in the telling of their own stories. Hollywood has a terrible history of creating movies and making money off the experiences of marginalised people, without letting them have any input in the process. A lot of the time, Hollywood makes these stories about queer, trans and minority folks and they get it wrong: there’s offensive material, tragic storylines, one-dimensional, stereotypical characters with little depth.”

What’s more, openly LGBT+ actors don’t always get the same opportunities as their straight counterparts. When Emma Stone yelled out, “I’m sorry” at the Golden Globes last week for playing a part-Asian character in the 2015 film Aloha, it wasn’t just an acknowledgement that she had stepped into an identity that isn’t ­– and never will be – hers, but that she had taken that opportunity from someone else more suitable. Someone else who, because of their identity, would rarely be cast in many of the other roles that are readily available to Stone.

Many out LGBT+ actors face the same limiting prejudice, overlooked for queer roles but deemed unsuitable for straight ones. “Honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out,” said Rupert Everett, who believes his opportunities wilted after he came out as gay, in 2009.

A recent study found that more than half of LGBT+ actors had heard anti-gay comments on set, while almost half of lesbian and gay respondents believed that producers and studio executives considered them less marketable. They were also less likely to have an agent. Speaking to Vice, actor Giovanni Bienne, the chair of Equity’s LGBT+ committee, recalled going up for straight roles and being asked to keep “it” up during the chat afterwards. “Sean Penn didn’t audition for Milk,” said Bienne, “but if he had, they wouldn’t have him blow the casting team away, and then be told that he couldn’t keep the ‘gay’ up afterwards.”

The 15 best films of 2018 Show all 15 1 /15 The 15 best films of 2018 The 15 best films of 2018 15. Shoplifters Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters could be the year’s most disarming film. On first glance, the clan at its centre are just like any other, but their impulsive decision to take in a missing girl begins a series of rug-pulls you wouldn’t expect from a film such as this. A complex heartbreaker, albeit one that starts out looking like the more modest family dramas Kore-eda is known for. GAGA Pictures / Thunderbird Releasing The 15 best films of 2018 14. Game Night “We knew there was a bad version of this movie that could exist,” said Game Night’s co-director John Francis Daley (the kid from Freaks and Geeks). This certainly isn’t it. Starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams as a competitive married couple who mistake an actual kidnapping for a particularly immersive role play game, Game Night is snappy, witty and fully committed to its brilliant, tonally unsettling conceit. Rex The 15 best films of 2018 13. Isle of Dogs Any Wes Anderson film is likely to be offbeat, fastidiously stylish and shot through with the auteur's understated drollery. Isle of Dogs is no different. A stop-motion story of abandoned canines taking on a corrupt human government, it's set in a futuristic Japan and deals with some pretty heavy themes (fascism, ethnic cleansing). Funny and full of heart. The 15 best films of 2018 12. They Shall Not Grow Old Peter Jackson’s First World War documentary is a remarkable step-forward for historical filmmaking. The Lord of the Rings director breathes new life into black and white archive footage from the Imperial War Museum, digitally restoring and smoothing the grainy source material before adding colour and sound. The result is a stunning cinematic experience that vividly brings the past into the present. By using the voices of veteran British soldiers interviewed about their experiences in the trenches, Jackson also includes a fascinating narrative that’s both gripping and informative. A wonderfully apt way to mark the centenary of the Great War. BBC/IWM The 15 best films of 2018 11. First Reformed Nobody knew if Paul Schrader still had it in him to make a film as angry or as barbed as First Reformed. There is the same raw power here as found in his earlier features about tormented loners. Cinephiles will delight in the (sometimes a little self-conscious) references to Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, but you can’t help but relish the intensity and intelligence in Ethan Hawke’s performance as the tormented, guilt-ridden priest. Picturehouse Entertainment The 15 best films of 2018 10. Black Panther There were two Marvel films released this year, one of which – Avengers Infinity War – was an over-crowded, if ambitious, sequel. The other was a landmark film – not just for Marvel, but for cinema. Black Panther was fit to bursting with selling points, all combining to deliver the studio’s best film: Michael B Jordan’s standout villain, scene-stealing performances from Danai Guria and Letitia Wright, plus the direction of Creed’s Ryan Coogler who proved an inspired appointment. Wakanda forever, indeed. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures The 15 best films of 2018 9. Cold War Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, shot in the sleekest black and white, is an effortlessly stylish and romantic drama set in a period of political convulsion. It offers everything from Polish folk music to the sultriest Birth of the Cool-style jazz. Pawlikowski includes moments of reckless hedonism alongside scenes of exile and imprisonment. Best of all, the film has a truly wonderful performance from Joanna Kulig as Zula, the free-spirited young folk singer turned femme fatale. Kino Świat The 15 best films of 2018 8. A Star Is Born There are no two ways about it: Bradley Cooper's rock star Jackson Mane inviting Ally – a small-town waitress played by Lady Gaga – onto stage to sing her song in front of thousands of his fans is movie magic. Regardless of your stance on the film's back half and pretty maudlin ending, A Star is Born is an old-fashioned success story with an intensity that brings up the hairs on the back of your neck. Clay Enos/Warner Bros/AP The 15 best films of 2018 7. The Rider Director Chloé Zhao took a gamble casting a real-life family in this modern-day western about a cowboy named Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau). It pays off – this an authentic portrait of contemporary rodeo life in South Dakota. From her amateur cast she somehow coaxes performances more memorable than most pros manage in their entire careers. As moving as it is bold, The Rider also offers an all-too-rare female perspective on masculinity. Sony Pictures Classics The 15 best films of 2018 6. Leave No Trace Eight years after Winter’s Bone made a star of Jennifer Lawrence, Leave No Trace – director Debra Granik’s first feature film since then – should rightly make a star of Thomasin McKenzie too. Based on the book My Abandonment by Peter Rook, Leave No Trace is virtually a two-hander between McKenzie and Ben Foster. They play a PTSD-suffering war veteran and his daughter, who live in the forests of Oregon, fending for themselves. Even when the two are arrested and placed in government housing, the film refuses to be anything other than understated and is all the more beguiling for it. AP The 15 best films of 2018 5. The Shape of Water Loneliness can sometimes feel like your soul has been chained to the bottom of the ocean, at other times it can feel like you’re speaking a language no one else understands. Guillermo del Toro beautifully illustrates both these nuances in his Oscar-winning fantasy romance, in which a mute woman (Sally Hawkins) unexpectedly falls for a strange aquatic creature (Doug Jones), the only one who sees her as she truly wants to be seen. Theirs is a love so mystical, so overwhelming, that it can only be communicated through the language of dreams. Twentieth Century Fox The 15 best films of 2018 4. Lady Bird Lady Bird will always be close to our hearts. There are times when it feels less like a film, more like a hand tracing delicately through memories, of what it felt like to grow up, to say goodbye, and to find one's own place in the universe. Greta Gerwig’s story of a teenager, played by Saoirse Ronan, desperate to escape her hometown and seek the intellectual haven of the East Coast colleges (“where the culture is”, she argues) may be specific in its layout, but it is universal in its emotions. Moviestore/REX The 15 best films of 2018 3. You Were Never Really Here Whenever Lynne Ramsey attaches her name to a film, you know to expect something special. You Were Never Really Here marks a career-high for the British auteur, who manages to condense the violent story of a former military man searching for a stolen girl into a viciously edited 90-minute thriller. Joaquin Phoenix makes for the perfect enigmatic leading man, while Jonny Greenwood’s mechanical, piercing score adds to the decidedly eerie atmosphere. Amazon Studio The 15 best films of 2018 2. Phantom Thread Should Phantom Thread really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final film, then the actor can retire knowing that Reynolds Woodcock ranks among his greatest roles. Day-Lewis plays the egomaniacal fashion designer with a childish whimsy, but there's also a spectral quality to him that looms in every scene. Lesley Manville’s deliciously funny Cyril and Vicky Krieps’s superbly sharp Alma offer two cunning counters to Reynolds’s growing appetite for self-destruction, making for some wonderfully heated confrontations. Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction allows each character to blossom on screen, in a film that makes for a masterful study of poisonous relationships. REX The 15 best films of 2018 1. Roma Loosely based on his own childhood, Alfonso Cuaron's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Gravity is a gorgeous piece of film-making, a quiet paean to the women who raised him. It's a neorealist masterpiece, shot in 65mm black and white, and built from detailed vignettes of domestic life in early 1970s Mexico City, a time there of great social unrest. Savour every scene: the camera takes it all in, as we follow a young Mixtec woman named Cleo (wonderful newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) who looks after a well-to-do family she comes to think of as her own. It's about love, grief and resilience: it will slay you. Netflix

But the idea that queer actors should stay in the closet is a troubling one. “Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality,” said Matt Damon, who is publicly married to a woman, in 2015. It’s hard not to see a double standard at play.

When Ellen Page first signed on to play Stacie Andree – a gay woman fighting for the right to receive her dying partner’s pension benefits – in 2015’s Freeheld, she was, in her words, “very, very, very closeted”. But as filming approached, she told herself: “There’s no way you cannot be an actively out gay person if you make this film.” And so, in 2014, she came out as gay during a speech at a Human Rights Campaign conference. “There was something about being out, getting to play a gay character, and getting to play a woman who is so inspiring to me,” Page told Time magazine, “it was such an amazing experience.” She’s played straight characters since – in films such as 2016’s Tallulah – but she’s also embraced her role as a trailblazer in an industry that still underrepresents voices like hers. “Honestly, if I played gay characters for the rest of my career, I’d be thrilled.”

Underpowered: Julianne Moore and Ellen Page star in ‘Freeheld’, a creaky, true-life drama about homophobia

Where, though, does sexual fluidity fit into the debate? And what about actors who aren’t yet ready to discuss their own identity? When I interviewed Chloe Grace Moretz last year, for gay conversion therapy drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post, she grew uncomfortable when I mentioned an article citing her as a straight actor playing a gay role. “Well, I think what’s important is don’t assume anyone’s sexuality,” she said. “I mean, across the board, don’t assume.” A few months later, she was photographed kissing model Kate Harrison on the streets of Malibu.

For Desiree Akhavan, who directed Moretz in Cameron Post and recently starred in brilliant Channel 4 series The Bisexual, the most important thing is that there’s “a queer hand at the wheel”. “If they cast a straight actor and they have a lot of queer people on the team and they bring dignity to the role, I think it’s cool,” she said.

There is no easy, prescriptive solution here. But what is abundantly clear is that queer voices need to be heard – and not only when they’re spoken through the mouths of straight people.