Piers Morgan has expressed his opinion on a years-long debate ( Jason Mendez/Getty Images)

Presenter and commentator Piers Morgan has taken it upon himself to wade into the debate about whether gay roles should be played by gay actors, amid a continued glass ceiling for LGBTQ+ stars in the TV and film industry.

The discourse about who should play certain roles and has been bubbling on and off for a number of years, with several high-profile stars – including Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, Joe Locke, Ben Whishaw and Nicholas Galitzine – weighing in on it.

On the one side some believe LGBTQ+ roles should be solely reserved for LGBTQ+ actors as they can perform the role with lived authenticity, whilst others believe roles should be open to all performers, regardless of whether their identity is the same as the character’s.

In his 3 December column for The Sun, the Piers Morgan Uncensored host wrote that he loved Rupert Everett’s response to backlash against Scarlett Johansson for taking the role of trans man Dante “Tex” Gill in the now-cancelled film Rub & Tug in 2018.

Piers Morgan (ITV)
“Did it matter that Tom Hanks isn’t gay when he played a gay man in Philadelphia, the first big movie about HIV/AIDS, and did it so well that he won an Oscar, and shone such a massively important and effective global light on the killer disease?,” Morgan wrote.

“It did to the woke brigade, who’ve since attacked him so much for it that he now says he shouldn’t have accepted the part because there was a lack of authenticity in “a straight guy playing a gay guy”.”

Morgan went on to call the criticism of Hanks “poppycock” and listed off other actors who played specific roles without having the traits of their characters, such as Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter.

“Just let actors do what they do best – act!” he said.

Morgan is no stranger to commenting on LGBTQ+ topics unprompted, having previously criticised Kew Gardens’ Queer Nature After Hours event, asking “why can’t we just have straight plants”.