An Interview with Susan Sarandon

Photo Credit: Ken Regan/HBO

AE: In the gay community, gay men are often drawn to powerful, interesting women, and as a woman with a gay following yourself, I was wondering what you think it is about iconic women that might interest gay men so much.
SS: As I said before, I think iconic women are interesting to a lot of people, but probably safer for a gay guy in most instances. And I think iconic women also feel that they are loved by a lot of gay men and that they’re understood by gay men more than they are by heterosexual men, and that their friendships last longer and that they’re more loyal.

I think I’ve heard a lot of women say that I am so much more myself when I’m with my gay male friends, and that’s because of...this need for straight guys to dominate a woman. When you take the sex out of the equation, sometimes it’s very freeing and you have more fun, so I think that the reverse is also true. A lot of iconic women love to be with gay guys because they feel understood.

What’s that expression? Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars? They’re talking about straight men and straight women, that there is just an agreement that you’re misunderstood by straight guys. So I think that there’s a seamlessness that can happen between gay men and women, whether they’re iconic or not.

AE: Are there any gay men in your life with whom you’re particularly close?
SS: So many that I can’t even begin to tell you, and there always have been. Anybody in this business is an outsider, so first of all, there are gay men all throughout this profession in every capacity, besides the actors and writers and directors and costume designers and designers and the arts just in general.

But I have so many friends in my life that are gay, and the straight men that I’ve had relationships with, you know when you end that relationship it’s very rare that they stick around. So I have to say that the bulk of people that hold my heart and have been through the most with me and have been in my life the longest are gay men and women, definitely. I have about six girlfriends that have been in my life for 30 years, but yes, absolutely, I have surrendered my well-being to and have amused and grown up with, if there is such a thing as a gay community...by people who happen to be gay.

I was saying in another interview that when AIDS hit, it was kind of like the bonding that happened after 9/11 among New Yorkers, because I lost so many friends and I fought so hard to try to even get people to talk about what was going on during the whole Reagan administration. I felt committed in a completely different way through the tragedy of that time and the loneliness of that time and everything that happened.

I don’t know how old you are, but if you haven’t lived through that period, it was so scary and so devastating and we lost so many people that the world just seemed to get so gray. Just all the color drained out of it for so many of us. That for me was also a huge turning point in defining my commitment and realizing how deep my love of my friends went who happened to be gay.

AE: Jumping back to Bernard and Doris, I know it only had a budget of $500,000, yet it looked so much more expensive. It looked like a full-blown film. With such a small budget, was it ever intended for theatrical release?
SS: Well, we did hope . . . yeah, sure, we were mainly just trying to get it done and thank God and thanks to Joe Aulisi and Donna Karan and my friend Frankie Diego and what she was able to round up. You know, I’ve done low-budget films before, but not ones pretending to be high budget films. There’s a difference.

Even Bob Roberts cost four million dollars and that was in contemporary clothing. When HBO became interested in [Bernard and Doris], when they were trying to decide what to do with it, I did hope that it would be released theatrically because that’s my conditioning, that’s my snobbery or whatever. I wanted it to be a little film out there and they convinced me that they would be able to get it to more people this way.