The director of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has shot down rumours of Bucky’s bisexuality.
In the first episode of the Marvel series, Sebastian Stan’s fan-favourite character is set up on a date with a waitress called Leah, where he points out the “weird pictures” he sees on online dating sites.
“I mean, tiger photos?” he says. “Half the time, I don’t even know what I’m looking at. It’s a lot.”
Photos of tigers were extremely popular a few years back on Tinder, but were banned in 2017 due to concerns over animal cruelty, and a majority of these profiles were male accounts.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier viewers took Bucky’s remark as evidence that he identifies as bisexual, and social media erupted in welcoming the character to the LGBTQ+ community.
Speaking with Variety after the season one finale, director Kari Skogland said it was never their intention to make Bucky canonically bisexual. “I think we just thought of it as an oddity of the times, because he’s so confused by it,” she said.
“Because don’t forget, he’s 106 years old. He’s just confused by the whole thing.”
Skogland said she and Stan never had a conversation about how Bucky’s foray into dating sites would implicate his sexuality. Their aim was to display the character’s “lack of technical skills, as well as being part of any kind of community.”
She continued to explain: “He doesn’t fit. So that was I think more our intention there that try to point to any one particular affinity.”
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier viewers also pointed out the undeniable sexual chemistry between Stan’s character and Anthony Mackie’s Falcon due to their aggressiveness towards each other. We all saw that therapy session, didn’t we?
Don’t get us started on this moment:
“It’s really love, right? They love each other — at the end,” she said.
“They don’t love each other at the beginning, but they come to a friendship place where they love each other. So I’m not really sensitive to masculinity as any kind of barrier between that love, or how it should manifest.
“I’m completely fluid when it comes to any of that. So there’s no defined sexuality to any of it. So it’s, really, I think, just affection.”
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is now available to stream on Disney+.
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