Sony PicturesPaul Feig has already broken barriers (and pissed off many die-hard fans) by making the stars of his Ghostbusters reboot female, but there is one other unconventional issue he left up to innuendo.
Kate McKinnon, the first openly lesbian star of SNL, plays one of the heroines, Jillian Holtzmann. Her character flirts with Erin Gilbert, played by SNL alum Kristen Wiig.
When asked if McKinnon's character is gay, Feig told The Daily Beast this week, "What do you think?"
He then grinned and nodded, saying, "I hate to be coy about it...but when you're dealing with the studios and that kind of thing..."
Feig did not name any. Ghostbusters studio and distributor Sony Pictures has not commented.
In the interview, Feig also talked about McKinnon's character's chemistry with co-star Melissa McCarthy's.
"You know, Kate is who she is and I love the relationship between Kate and Melissa's characters," he said. "I think it's a very interesting, close relationship. If you know Kate at all she's this kind of pansexual beast where it's just like everybody who's around her falls in love with her and she's so loving to everybody she's around. I wanted to let that come out in this character."
"I wasn't like, 'And now you should wink at them,' he added. This is stuff that is coming out of Kate! That's why you connect with those characters. They're playing versions of themselves. That's what makes a comedic actor fantastic, when that personality comes out."
Ghostbusters, which opens Friday, has received mixed reviews. Many fans who grew up with the '80s franchise, which features all-male heroes, wrote off the reboot the moment it was announced the main stars are women. The movie's first trailer, released in March, has received more than 266,000 thumbs up reviews on YouTube but 933,000 users gave it a thumbs down.
"I didn't realize that for certain older guys, the original Ghostbusters is the equivalent of a tree house that has the no girls allowed sign on it," Feig told Vulture. "And I think they look at me as the guy who came up, took the sign, lit it on fire, and then painted the inside of the tree house pink."
"There wasn't even a thought about gender. It was just, ‘These guys are all funny. We're going to do it.' I never thought it was male-exclusive. None of us did," added producer Ivan Reitman, who had directed the 1984 movie Ghostbusters and its 1989 sequel.