Following a comment that came during an appearance on Bill Maher’s podcast at the end of April, the story was aggregated widely, to the far horizon: Actor Terrence Howard claimed that he was once in talks for a role as Marvin Gaye in a biopic of the late singer, but that Howard turned it down because he didn’t want to kiss a man on screen.
The way Howard tells the story is, he had been asked to play Smokey Robinson in a biopic of that singer, but had to turn it down because he was in “conversation with Lee Daniels about playing Marvin Gaye” in a different biopic.
However, Howard at one point discussed the matter with Quincy Jones, asking him about rumors that Marvin Gaye was homosexual. When Jones answered affirmatively, Howard decided to turn down the Gaye movie.
“They would’ve wanted to do that, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that,” Howard told Maher. “That would fuck me… I would cut my lips off. If I kissed some man, I would cut my lips off.”
“I can’t play that character 100 percent,” Howard said. “I can’t surrender myself to a place that I don’t understand.”
Once this interview appeared, it was covered widely in the press, with numerous outlets taking Howard’s word for it.
Much of the discussion of this has either called Howard homophobic, or defended the decision as an actor setting a boundary and adhering to it. There have been darker, conspiratorial assertions made, about Hollywood supposedly putting actors through “humiliation rituals” involving playing gay on screen. In some circles, meanwhile, it’s considered taboo for a straight actor to play a gay character, although whether Marvin Gaye really was that is a whole other question (more on that below).
Probably Not True
I have another thought on this: I’m not sure that the story is true. It’s not clear exactly when this happened. It probably would have been at the height of both Daniels’ and Howard’s clout, at some point between when Daniels directed Precious (2009) and the height of Empire (starting in 2015.) One report in 2010 had Howard telling Deadline he was in talks to play Marvin Gaye, so for the sake of argument let’s say it was about then.
The movie in question, a biopic of Marvin Gaye directed by Lee Daniels, was never made (nor was the Smokey Robinson biopic that was also mentioned, although I’d love to see both movies – the recent terrible allegations against Robinson notwithstanding).
Beyond that, I have no memory and have never seen any news stories about Lee Daniels ever working on a Gaye biopic project. He may have wished to do so, and may have even discussed it with Howard. But the implication that such a movie was anywhere close to all set to go, until Howard said no to playing Marvin Gaye, seems like a stretch.
Nearly every Internet search about such a Lee Daniels Marvin Gaye film returns stories about Howard’s interview. However, in 2015, Marvin Gaye’s son, Marvin III, announced his intention to sue Daniels, claiming that the TV series he created, Empire — which starred Howard – had ripped off an idea of his about a Black family in showbiz. It’s not clear what became of this matter, but none of the contemporaneous news stories about it mention a Daniels attempt to make a Gaye biopic- and the threatened lawsuit would seem to make such a project unlikely.
Marvin Gaye’s story is compelling, filled with fantastic music and personal drama. It also has two things that biopic producers love: A late-career musical crescendo (Gaye’s NBA All-Star Game national anthem in 1983) and a shocking death (Gaye was shot and killed by his father in 1984).
On Marvin Gaye’s Wikipedia page, the “attempted biopic” section is five paragraphs long, although it does not mention any Lee Daniels version.
Indeed, there have been many attempts over the years to make a Marvin Gaye biopic, none of which have ever come to fruition.
In 1985, a year after Gaye’s death, the Los Angeles Times reported that Motown Records had won an auction for the movie and TV rights to his life story.
F. Gary Gray, who went on to direct Straight Outta Compton, was working on a life-spanning Gaye biopic, around 2008. Cameron Crowe worked on his own version, around 2010, with Variety stating that he had been “working very quietly for three and a half years to align the key elements on a pic about Motown singer Marvin Gaye,” which eyed Will Smith to play the lead role before he passed on it; the comment came in a longer Variety story about how difficult it was to get biopic projects off the ground.
That Deadline story in 2010 did say that Terrence Howard was “in talks” to play Marvin Gaye, but this was for the Crowe version. There’s no mention of Lee Daniels, and the source for the Deadline story was Howard himself.
James Gandolfini, before his death in 2013, was at one point on board as a producer of a Gaye biopic, and Lenny Kravitz was once considered to star. In 2013, a version called Sexual Healing, which was to star Jesse L. Martin and focus on Gaye’s later life, actually started filming, with Julien Temple directing. But that project appears to have been abandoned before it was completed.
Both a documentary and a limited series about Gaye were announced in 2016, but neither ever happened.
At one point, in 2018, Dr. Dre was going to make a Marvin Gaye biopic, with Dre later announced in 2021 as a producer of a film, to be directed by Allen Hughes with the cooperation of Gaye’s widow. But nothing seems to have come of that either, with Hughes announcing in 2023 that he was prioritizing a planned Snoop Dogg biopic over the Gaye project.
Gaye’s estate is known for being litigious — they successfully sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over “Blurred Lines,” and later sued Ed Sheeran as well — so that might be another reason why producing such a biopic has been so slow-going.
As for the other question raised by Howard’s interview: Was Marvin Gaye actually gay? Gaye married two different women and was mostly known by reputation as a heterosexual R&B loverman.
I don’t doubt that Quincy Jones said that about him — if you remember those crazy late-in-life magazine interviews, Jones was known for telling wild stories about gay activities among famous, heterosexual-identifying people like Marlon Brando. He even famously told Vulture, of Brando: “He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherf*cker you ever met. He’d f*ck anything. Anything! He’d f*ck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye.”
Did that happen? Possibly (though Gaye’s son denied it at the time, declaring that his father was “a ladies man.”) There are certain deceased celebrities, where it’s been clearly established or confirmed, by biographers, historians, family members, or whoever else, that they were gay (think Luther Vandross.) That is not the case with Marvin Gaye; I’ve never heard any claim of that sort about him sourced to anyone but Quincy Jones.
Now, if Lee Daniels were to make a Marvin Gaye biopic, he may very well have explored that angle. Would such a scene be included in a mass-consumption Hollywood biopic of Marvin Gaye that would have the sign-off of his estate and family? Almost certainly not; even the biopic of Freddie Mercury was infamously squeamish about including gay love scenes.
Did such a movie project fall apart, after years and years of trying, merely because Terrence Howard didn’t want to kiss a man in it? Also, almost certainly not. What was to stop Howard from just telling Daniels, “You know what? I still want to play Marvin- and I don’t buy that stuff about him kissing men.”?
