Disney's first live action interracial kiss will be in Beauty and the Beast

It sounds like the new live-action remake of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is to be breaking boundaries wherever it sees them.

Only this week, director Bill Condon revealed that the movie has Disney’s first ‘exclusively gay moment’.

And now, it Condon has revealed that the film has the first interracial kiss in a live action Disney movie too, a fact which seems somehow hard to fathom.

Speaking to the BBC’s Front Row about the kiss, between Stanley Tucci’s Cadenza and Audra McDonald’s Madame de Garderobe, he said: “I didn’t give it a second thought, then at the preview, the [Disney] chairman told me that it was the first and second interracial kiss in a Disney movie.

“That shocked me. I was surprised it hadn’t happened before…. and they [Disney] were excited by that.”

It was in an interview with Attitude magazine that Condon spoke of the ‘gay moment’, which sees Le Fou’s (Josh Gadd) admiration for Gaston (Luke Evans) develop into something more than seen in previous iterations.

“It’s somebody who’s just realising that he has these feelings,” he said.

“And Josh makes something really subtle and delicious out of it. And that’s what has its pay-off at the end, which I don’t want to give away. But it is a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.”

He went on to say that legendary lyricist Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyrics for the original cartoon classic, but died before it was released in 1991, saw the beast’s condition as a ‘metaphor for AIDS’ as it was seen in the late 80s and early 90s.

“He was cursed, and this curse had brought sorrow on all those people who loved him, and maybe there was a chance for a miracle and a way for the curse to be lifted. It was a very, very concrete thing that he was doing,” he said.

The movie, which stars Emma Watson as Belle, and Dan Stevens as the Beast, alongside Ewan McGregor and Kevin Kline, is due out in the UK on March 17.

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