True Blood’s Luke Grimes recast for refusing to play gay character

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At the time of last Sunday's season premiere of True Blood—its last ever—the most controversial thing about the episode seemed to be viewers' inability to decide if it was brilliant or horrible. For whatever reason the mainstream turned on the show in a big way around Season 4 and every subsequent year has inspired more and more vitriol. But a long view of the series shows that it began as a frequently laughable exercise in insanity and has never wavered from that mission, so those claiming a drop-off in quality are very much misremembering its origins. But exhaustion is exhaustion, no matter how restrained, tense, and intimate this final season promises to be, so fine. Anyway, you didn't come here for a critical essay about how one of TV's top-rated shows devolved into an underdog story. No, you came here because for the first time in a while the typically desperate-to-shockTrue Blood has managed to generate an honest-to-goodness controversy!

In a truly good piece of reporting, BuzzFeed's Louis Peitzman busted wide open the case of Luke Grimes, the actor who joined Season 6 as James, Jessica's high-cheekboned, brooding loner boyfriend in the vampire concentration camp. Tons of eyebrows were raised last December when reports surfaced that Grimes had left the production—his highest profile role to date—over "creative differences." But now we know what those creative differences might've actually been: The True Bloodwriters were refashioning James as a not only a love interest for Jessica, but also a love interest for Lafayette. So, in a truly retrograde bit of homophobia, Grimes decided that playing a gay (or, really, bisexual) role was unacceptable, whereas playing a blood-sucking demon and occasional murderer was totally fine. Also, before anybody claims that Grimes was right to walk away from a role when he wasn't given fair warning about his character's sexuality shift, remember that this is TRUE BLOOD, one of the gayest shows of all time and one in which almost every vampire character becomes bisexual over time. Both of the show's male heroes have had same sex dalliances (Bill Compton in fantasy sequences, and Eric Northman in actual sexual intercourse with a man he intended to murder). So yeah. Gay stuff is never not in the cards on True Blood. Anyway, Grimes' publicist informed Peitzman that Grimes' exit was almost entirely due to scheduling issues, but of course his publicist would say that. Meanwhile it's 2014 and career-panic homophobia continues to thrive in Hollywood.   [BuzzFeed]