Talk to Me Banned in Kuwait Over Zoe Terakes' Gender Identity, Actor Responds

Kuwait in an usual move had banned the Australian horror film Talk To Me on Friday due to it featuring a trans actor. In response, Zoe Terakes, who identifies herself as trans, gave out a statement saying there are no LGBTQ themes in the movie, and that they are just an actor who got the role. In a statement on X, Terakes talking about the ban said: "Our film doesn’t have queer themes. I am a trans actor who happened to get the role. I’m not a theme. I’m a person". Talk to Me Movie Review: The RackaRacka Duo’s Frighteningly Entertaining Horror Film is an Impressive Debut (LatestLY Exclusive).

They added, “Kuwait has banned this film due to my identity alone. It is a targeted and dehumanising means to harm me.” In a post back in August 4, the actor further said: “As much as it is very sad to be on the receiving end of this, what is even more heartbreaking is what this precedent means for the queer and trans people of Kuwait.”

"Eliminating trans actors on screens will not eliminate trans people (as much as the government of Kuwait wishes it would) but it will eliminate a lot of hope. And hope is such a large part of how we live as marginalised people. It’s how we learn to move through the hatred and the mistreatment and the violence," they further mentioned.

This is nothing new as Kuwait is one of the strictest countries not just in Middle East, but in the whole world when it comes to pro-LGBTQ and pro-Left content, leading to a ban on many films, the latest example being Barbie, despite it being greenlit for release in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. What made the ban surprising is that this ban was caused entirely due to someone’s identity, which is new for the country. Insidious The Red Door Movie Review: Patrick Wilson’s Uneventful Horror Film Lacks Genuine Scares and a Cohesive Plot (LatestLY Exclusive).

Some of the other very big films that have been in the country by the Censors in Kuwait that have even a remote mention of queer themes and characters, include major films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.