Benjamin Ainsworth (the one with the handbag) was born in Nottingham in 2008, and later moved to Lund, near Hull in Yorkshire. He scored his first professional acting job in 2016, in the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on the Norwegian Epic Cruise Line, six weeks in the Mediterranean and then six more in the Caribbean. He played Benjy, son of the drag queen Tick. who sings "Say a Little Prayer/Always on My Mind."
The same year he was cast as "a cheeky schoolboy" in an episode of the soap Emmerdale.
His next major role was the troubled boy Miles in The Haunting of Bly Manor, loosely based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with the two troubled children and ghosts bedeviling the nanny. I stopped watching in the first episode after a particularly nasty trigger (hint: "does the dog die?"), but according to a review there's a lesbian romance "drowned in sad and tired tropes" like Bury Your Gays. Yuck.
Left: Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Peter Quint, who is possessing Miles and forcing him to do bad things.
In the first season of The Sandman (2022), Roderick Burgess captures the Dream of the Endless and imprisons him naked in a glass jar. His son Alex (Ben as a boy, Laurie Kyaston as a young adult) has many opportunities to free him, but refuses, worrying that Dream will harm him or his boyfreind (Christopher Colquehon).
So far one gay and two gay-adjacent roles. Good job, buddy.
There have been dozens of movies based on Pinocchio, the 1883 novel by Carlo Colladi. The 2022 version, with Ben as the puppet boy, Tom Hanks as Gepetto, and Joseph Gordon Levitt (left) as Jiminy Crickett, is supposedly a live-action remake of the classic 1940 animated movie, with a lot of queer codes. But in some versions Pinoke gets a girlfriend, so I wouldn't be surprised if he is changed into a real boy through a glimpse of the Girl of His Dreams.
The IMDB description of Son of a Critch (2022-26) tells us that "Mark is 11 going on 70," and "tries to make connections with the small group of people in his limited world." Sounds like he's got that syndrome where you grow old as a child, or maybe he's aging backward, but it's a misdirection: Mark (Benji Boy) is just smart, and his "limited world" is Newfoundland in the 1980s. He's heterosexual; no gay people are mentioned in the series.
Ben is posing here with the real-life Mark Critch, who plays his dad, and Colto Gobbo, who plays his older brother.
Everything is Going to Be Great (2025) covers a year in the life of the Smart Family, as they negotiate "over-sized dreams, identity, ghosts, and regional theater." Trigger alert: this is advertised as a comedy, but Dad (Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle) dies halfway through.
He leaves two sons, the athletic Derrick (Jack Champion), who has a girlfriend, and Lester (Ben), who wears flashy outfits, aspires to a career in musical theater, and has conversations with the ghost of gay playwright Noel Coward. Those are sizeable queer codes. Google AI says that he's "openly gay," but according to the plot synopsis, he gets a girlfriend.
More after the break. Caution: Explicit.
