Olivia Colman Embraces Nonbinary Identity as Gay Man

has said she has always 'felt sort of nonbinary' as the actress opened up about her identity in a new interview.

Olivia, 52, who is best known for her roles in , The Favourite and Heartstopper and has been married to her husband Ed Sinclair for 25 years, said she has never felt comfortable with rigid gender roles, including in her own marriage.

The actress, who is promoting her new role in queer film Jimpa, explained: 'Throughout my whole life, I've had arguments with people where I've always sort of felt nonbinary.

'I've never felt massive feminine in my being female. I've always described myself to my husband as a gay man.

'And he goes, "Yeah I get that." And so I do feel at home and at ease.' 

She added to Them: 'I don't really spend a whole lot of time with people who are very staunchly heterosexual... The men I know and love are very in touch with all sides of themselves.

'I think with my husband and I, we take turns to be the "strong one", or the one who needs a little bit of gentleness. I believe everyone has all of it in them. I've always felt like that.

'I'm not alone in saying, "I don't feel like it's binary." And I loved that. I came away from making this film with, yeah, I knew I wasn't alone.

Nonbinary is a term used to describe a person's gender identity that falls outside the traditional male and female binary.

Olivia and Ed married in 2001, and share three children - Finn, 20, Hall, 18, and a ten-year-old daughter, after falling in love in the nineties while rehearsing for a Cambridge Footlights production of Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners. At the time, Olivia was studying teaching at Homerton College, Cambridge.

Ed was an actor before he became a screenwriter and film producer. He wrote the 2021 Sky drama series Landscapers starring Olivia and David Thewlis, and recently produced The Roses starring Olivia and Benedict Cumberbatch as a husband and wife at war. 

Recalling the first time she saw him, Olivia added: 'I'd gone to two of the rehearsals and there was no one particularly fanciable there. Then I walked in and I saw his left-hand profile. 

'At the time he was smoking a ciggie, his feet were crossed, and he's got this lovely bump in his nose and I saw his side profile and just went, "Oh my God, I'm going to marry him."

'I had proper thunderbolts: that's him, that's him! Poor thing, he didn't know.' 

In a typically self-deprecating manner, Olivia claimed that while she vividly remembers the first time she met Ed, the feeling wasn't mutual. 'He genuinely can't remember it,' she said. 

She previously told the Daily Mail in 2013: 'My husband and I were very lucky. We met when we had nothing and we loved each other then. So we were all right.

'We were 20 and he was also an actor. If you meet at that age then you're fine.'

The mother-of-three, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2019, stars alongside John Lithgow in the new movie