Lena Waithe is to voice the first openly gay character in an animated Disney movie.
The actress will place Officer Specter, a Cyclops police officer, in the Pixar film Onward. Officer Specter is the first self-identified LGBTQ character in the Disney-Pixar universe.
Onward’s producer Kori Rae and director Dan Scanlon confirmed the news in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment.
“It just kind of happened,” Rae told the publication. “The scene, when we wrote it, was kind of fitting and it opens up the world a little bit, and that’s what we wanted.”
“It’s a modern fantasy world and we want to represent the modern world,” Scanlon added.
Set in a suburban fantasy world, two teenage elf brothers, Ian and Barley Lightfoot, go on an journey to discover if there is still a little magic left out there in order to spend one last day with their father, who died when they were too young to remember him.
The film also stars Chris Pratt, Tom Holland, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer and Tracey Ullman.
Onward is due to arrive in cinemas in Ireland on March 6. And based off the early reactions to the film, it looks like it will be one that you won’t want to miss.
