Interview with Matthew Goode and Julian Jarrold about the newer, gayer "Brideshead Revisited"

As you may have heard, an all-new, gay-injected adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited is currently opening across the country. Our good friend John Polly had a chance to sit down with the film's young star Matthew Goode (Charles Ryder) as well as director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots) to ask them about the film's making the character of Sebastian Flyte explicitly gay and his relationship with Charles more overtly romantic.

AfterElton.com:  In this Brideshead Revisited, the Sebastian character is presented as more overtly gay. So, did you have think about how you approach the relationship between he and Charles? Were you concerned about Charles just coming off as a sexual opportunist, that he may just be taking advantage of Sebastian?
Matthew Goode: Given the social climbing aspect, you mean ... No, I thought Charles and Sebastian’s relationship was more interesting for showing the idea of what male love is, and the complications of that. I thought of them as two people who had quite comparable loveless childhoods gravitating towards each other. And I think what Ben [Whishaw, who plays Sebastian] did with it was so much more interesting — not in comparison to the original TV series, but in general.

Charles’ Cousin Jasper does say [of Sebastian and his flamboyant friends at Oxford], “Sodomites — steer well clear of them!” So there’s obviously something much more than just youthful exuberance going on there, which sets them apart. So to have something definitive to play against is great. For Charles, it’s more a question of platonic love, and then you bring Julia in and ... Charles does bang on about how [she and Sebastian] are so alike, in manner and look, that it would be an easy transference for someone to go, “Well ... as much as I love you and as much as I love this extraordinary living out our childhood now at the age of 18...” as he and Sebastian do during their long summer together ... It made sense for me for Charles to have that switch...

AE: And if Charles had met Julia first, would he have later been attracted to Sebastian?
MG: Obviously, Charles’ friendship with Sebastian was the main love affair of his life, and I think that’s one of the reasons he has such guilt at the end. Nothing’s black and white in this, really. And I never saw it as he was so hugely in love with Julia, but again I never saw him as a social climber. I just don’t think that Charles understands love. And if you look at that line when Charles finally sleeps with Julia, he says it was like taking possession of the keys for the freehold. Which makes him look like a definitive social climber, but I think his personal ambitions only come on in the second half of the film.

I think the main love of his life was Sebastian, but in that way that they were linked.

AE: Making Sebastian’s character more explicitly gay this time around ... How did you approach that —and why make him more directly gay?
Julian Jarrold: I thought it was a very interesting part of the book and his character, and although people have discussed the sort of homoerotic relationship and how explicit it should be, it’s a very important key part of Sesbastian’s conflict within himself. It’s about the fact that he wants to behave in a certain way but his mother and his upbringing and all the pressures of society are telling him to do something else. It’s such an important factor in his development as a character.

AE: And now is an easier time to tell that story?
JJ: I think it’s a resonant aspect of the book, and at the time it was extremely brave and difficult and unusual thing to put in a book, written in 1945. And there are autobiographical aspects to it, in terms of Evelyn Waugh’s own history. But I think it’s one of the reasons why people are fascinated by the book.

There’s a certain ambiguity because I think it’s more of a “love” really between Sebastian and Charles — from Charles’ point of view anyway, and maybe Sebastian would like it to go further.

Be sure to check back later this week for our full review of Brideshead.