Lenny Kravitz was inspired by Tom Ford to play stylist Cinna in ‘The Hunger Games’.
The singer-and-actor had not heard about the Suzanne Collins novel – which tells the tale of a future world where youngsters are made to fight to the death for TV audiences – but wanted to make his character as toned down as possible so he wasn’t ”too outrageous”.
He said: ”I’ll be quite frank with you – I didn’t know about ‘Hunger Games’ – so when I’m telling kids and they say, ‘Who are you playing?’ and I say Cinna, they go, ‘Oh you’re playing the gay guy.’
”The question was ‘How far do we go with him?’ The idea was to pull it back and create a character that’s more like a Tom Ford or an Yves Saint Laurent so he wouldn’t be too outrageous. He’s classic, he’s got his gold eyeliner. I kind of played him in the middle.”
The 47-year-old star did not go into the role thinking that the character was gay, but merely eccentric.
He added to Celebuzz: ”I thought about it, and I read the book and I don’t see that he is or isn’t [gay]. He’s a designer, he’s a stylist, he has gold eyeliner-that doesn’t mean anything either way.”