Yep, Kate McKinnon’s Ghostbusters Character Is Gay

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Ghostbusters director Paul Feig took a moment to clear up some questions about the film. One question that was on viewer’s minds after seeing the film: Was Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann a lesbian?

People hoped the trailer that McKinnon’s character was gay going back to the trailer: her flirtatious performance with Wiig’s character (lots of winks and not-so-subtle pickup lines) left many fans wondering if Jillian Holtzmann was a lesbian.

“What do you think?” Feig said to The Daily Beast. “I’d like to think yes,” reporter Jen Yamato responded. Feig grinned and nodded before replying, “I hate to be coy about it, but when you’re dealing with the studios and that kind of thing…”

Feig isn’t the only director afraid of putting an bringing sexuality talk to the big screen. Earlier this year, Variety examined Hollywood’s aversion to putting explicitly LGBT characters in films that are not LGBT-focused. “It’s one thing for a studio executive to support gay marriage. It’s another to risk $200 million on a movie with a gay protagonist that needs to play in China and Russia, countries where LGBT citizens face discrimination, legal challenges, and violence,” Brent Lang wrote.

Feig said that it was natural for McKinnon’s character to be gay: “You know, Kate is who she is and I love the relationship between Kate and Melissa’s characters. I think it’s a very interesting, close relationship. If you know Kate at all she’s this kind of pansexual beast where it’s just like everybody who’s around her falls in love with her and she’s so loving to everybody she’s around. I wanted to let that come out in this character.”

McKinnon—who is Saturday Night Live‘s first openly lesbian cast member— has talked a lot about the power of individuality, which is why she’s so unafraid to be unique. “I tried for a short time to be something I wasn’t, and had no success with it,” McKinnon said in a recent interview with the LA Times. “It’s a practical solution to just be yourself.”

That’s why McKinnon’s character, Holtzmann, was so authentic and funny, Feig says. In a lot of the film, McKinnon added in her own mannerisms and improv lines: “I wasn’t like, ‘And now you should wink at them,’” Feig told The Daily Beast. “This is stuff that is coming out of Kate! That’s why you connect with those characters. They’re playing versions of themselves. That’s what makes a comedic actor fantastic, when that personality comes out,” he said. “Why would you hire these people who have these enormous personalities and then just cut them off?”

Read the full interview at The Daily Beast