 Amazing Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield recently said something that's downright courageous, given the ideology currently driving modern Hollywood. When an interviewer for The Telegraph asked whether it's okay for straight actors to play gay characters, as Garfield did in the musical Angels in America, his reply was incredible. I think it's two different conversations getting conflated. One is about equality of opportunity, but the other is about empathetic imagination, and if we only allow people to be cast as exactly who they are, it'll be the death of it. Empathy is the only thing that's going to save us right now. Naturally, some people on Twitter are mad, but the purpose of art, and the literal job of an actor, is to connect with other people's experiences, even if we haven't had the same experiences in our own lives. The most beautiful thing about art is that it connects us with other parts of humanity. If we abandon this idea, we condemn ourselves to never trying to communicate with people who aren't like us, and to never understand them ourselves.