You’ll hear Nigerian music, my parents speak in Igbo, my mum’s got her wrap on and cooks Nigerian food. Like many first-generation Londoners, he experienced a divided sense of nationality. Kene’s Wikipedia page is essentially a long list of the roles he’s played and the plays he’s had produced, but from a 2/25/13 Guardian interview by Maddy Costa, we learn that he was born in Laos, Nigeria, in 1987 his parents emigrated to London in 1991. Until the end, when they embrace and kiss again and he falls asleep wrapped around Ade in bed.Īde is the steady one, long ago resigned to a simple life outside of football and (now) comfortable with his homosexuality. Fending off repose, connection, affection. Keeping up a rain of talk, challenging Ade, ragging him, reminiscing (both players reel off tiny details of matches from years ago), bragging about his working-class toughness and his top-footballer status, putting down faggots, (in the later scenes) popping pills and pouring down drink. His performance as Jason in The Pass is extraordinary: intensely physical, always in action, one emotion after another flickering across his face, showing off his body (NSFW warning!).
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Of the four men in this posting, he’s the gay one. He played Joe Pitt in the National Theatre Ensemble production of Angels in America I wrote about there. Tovey (born in 1981) is an old acquaintance on this blog my 8/21/17 posting “Angels in Palo Alto” has a section on him. (#2) Note Tovey’s ears ears are a theme in this posting The impact of this ‘pass’ reverberates through the next ten years of their lives - a decade of fame and failure, secrets and lies, in a sporting world where image is everything And then, out of nowhere, one of them kisses the other. They skip, fight, mock each other, prepare their kit, watch a teammate’s sex tape. They should be sleeping, but they’re over-excited.
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It’s the night before their first-ever game for the first team - a Champions League match - and they’re in a hotel room in Romania. Nineteen-year-olds Jason and Ade have been in the Academy of a famous London football club since they were eight years old. The film deals with the issue of a homosexual relationship between two English football players, and how their lives unfold over the course of a decade.
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Williams, based on a play by John Donnelly. The Pass is a 2016 film starring Russell Tovey and Arinzé Kene.
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Russell tovey there were no masculine gay men movie#
(#1) A poster for the movie (Tovey on left, Kene on right), showing the incipient first kiss And man-on-man kissing, both touching and moving. Both are fraught love stories set in intensely masculine working-class social worlds. I view it as the functional equivalent of a man and woman kissing: an act of romantic connection with a spicy tang of sexual attraction (but no more)Īnd so I come to two recent British films viewed on Netflix: The Pass (Russell Tovey and Arinzé Kene as footballers) and God’s Own Country (Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu as Yorkshire sheep farmers). Especially men kissing men, an act that enrages a fair number of people, apparently because they have been conditioned to view it as the functional equivalent of two sweaty naked men fucking. As furors break out here and there over same-sex kisses in the media (especially in ads) and also in real life (in public places) - disgusting! THINK OF THE CHILDREN! get that out of my sight! - I move to celebrate them.