Terrence Howard didn’t hold back when it came time to reveal what he’s not willing to do for a role.
During the Sunday, April 14, episode of Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast, Howard recalled the “biggest mistake” of his career. While claiming that Smokey Robinson approached him about playing the famous singer in a biopic, Howard said he turned him down because he was already in conversations about portraying Marvin Gaye — which he said turned out to be a big mistake.
Maher noted that he thinks Gaye’s life is “much more interesting,” and told the actor, “You would’ve been perfect as Marvin Gaye, and that is a story that needs to be told.”
Ultimately, Howard didn’t play either musician. “I was over at Quincy Jones’ house and I’m asking Quincy, ‘I’m hearing rumors that Marvin was gay.’ And I’m like, ‘Was he gay?’”
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After Jones answered in the affirmative, Howard said he couldn’t play the part.
“They would’ve wanted to do that, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that,” Howard explained, referring to the potential portrayal of a gay relationship onscreen.
“You mean, you couldn’t kiss a guy onscreen in a movie?” Maher asked, to which Howard answered, “No. Because I don’t fake it.”
“I couldn’t kiss a man either,” Maher agreed.Howard then took things a step further. “That would f*** me. I would cut my lips off. If I kissed some man, I would cut my lips off.”
Maher took a beat and added that he wouldn’t go that far. “It does not make me homophobic to not want to kiss a man,” Howard insisted. “I can’t play that character 100 percent. I can’t surrender myself to a place that I don’t understand.”
Howard has come under fire for alleged homophobia before. On April 9, the actor told the host of the “PBD” podcast, “I’ve lost businesses because I don’t bend over in that way. I don’t compromise. I don’t play gay roles. I don’t kiss a man. I don’t do that s*** because the man card means everything.”
The admission sparked a strong response from Star Trek: Discovery star Wilson Cruz, who reshared the video clip and captioned it, “He sure did talk a different talk and act in a different way when it came to working with me in the 90’s. Loved my work, loved my choices, etc. This fool is out here performing for the WHYTE man, doing and saying what he needs to do to get over. He is quite literally BENDING OVER and doing what pleases THE MAN and he seems to enjoy it.”
“The truth is no one wants to work with his tired a**, anyway, due to his ego and lack of work ethic, so quite literally, go f*** yourself. You are the sellout here,” Cruz added.
Though rumors surrounded Gaye’s sexuality for years, the singer was married twice to two different women — first to Anna Gordy, and later to Janis Hunter.
In 2018, Quincy Jones told Vulture that Gaye and the actor Marlon Brando had a relationship.
“Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherf–ker you ever met,” he told the outlet at the time. “He’d f*** anything. Anything! He’d f*** a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye.”
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Back in 2020, Jane Fonda admitted that she always regretted not sleeping with Gaye. In an interview with the New York Times published in September, she said Che Guevara wasn’t the man who got away — it was the “Mercy Mercy Me” singer. “He wanted to and I didn’t,” she explained. Fonda was married to Tom Hayden at the time.
“I was meeting a lot of performers to try to do concerts for Tom and the woman who was helping me do that introduced me to Marvin Gaye,” she recalled.
