Luke Macfarlane knows more than one way to fall in love with somebody. In over a dozen Hallmark movies, this gay man has fallen chastely in love with beautiful women including shoe addicts, “Christmasphobes,†and a world-famous pianist. On the ABC drama Brothers and Sisters, he played Scotty Wandell, a confident gay man who ends up in a relationship with Matthew Rhys’s Kevin, with whom he considered but turned down a three-way with an ex. Now, in the upcoming Universal rom-com Bros, he falls in love with Billy Eichner while taking detours into three-ways, four-ways, poppers, Grindr, and steroidal muscle worship. Instead of being in a Hallmark movie, he’s in a movie that won’t stop making fun of Hallmark movies.
Bros follows Eichner’s character, Bobby Leiber, a loudmouthed, flaming gay podcaster, as he falls in love with what he sees as his natural enemy: Aaron, a “boring†masc guy who can have sex with anyone he wants. Macfarlane gets the honor of playing the intentionally blank Aaron, a non-straight straight man, while surrounded by a constant barrage of the best queer character actors the world has to offer: Harvey Fierstein, Bowen Yang, Ts Madison, and Jim Rash only scratch the surface. In the center of all that flamboyance, Macfarlane has to hold the audience’s attention as the living embodiment of Grindr’s trademark faceless torso. Ahead of Bros’s wide release, Macfarlane, who came out in 2008, discussed what it’s like to play boring without being boring, starring in a major studio-released rom-com, and whether or not he thinks there is precedent for Bros in the lineage of gay cinema.
Within five minutes of your character being introduced, we hear him referred to as “boring.†How do you approach playing a character whose description includes “boring�
The beginning of the movie was the hardest part to film. There’s a part of Billy’s character that’s saying that because he’s intimidated by Aaron. But also, boring people tend to not talk a lot. There were definitely conversations where I said, “I think I should say less.†I asked to have lines removed, which most actors do not do.
That’s very selfless of you.
[Laughs.] Yeah. He’s boring in the sense that maybe he looks conventional. Something that happens at the beginning of the movie, too, is that he drops his voice a lot. Rewatching the movie, I was like, Oh my God, my voice is so low. He’s trying so hard to be this regular, masc, kind of boring guy.
When you look at him in the beginning of the movie, do you consider him boring?
No. I don’t think he is boring. I think he is probably very self-conscious that people think he’s boring. Do you think he’s boring at the beginning of the movie?
I knew enough about rom-coms to know he was going to open up.
When I moved to New York City at 19 years old to go to Juilliard, they taught us to get rid of all our ideas about what it means to be a certain kind of person, because that is boring. Aaron is a guy who never had to learn those lessons because he had his face buried in law books. The great thing about being an actor is that you’re encouraged from a really young age to question, Who are you? What’s this thing you have on? Take that off. That’s not interesting. The beginning of the movie was like going back to being 19 years old for me.
As a gay actor who plays straight roles, have you had to put back on some of the layers Juilliard taught you to discard in order to get cast?
I’ve done a lot of straight roles, and weirdly, sexuality doesn’t really play into it. There’s a lot of very interesting essays about what a gay voice is and what gay movements are. I never really think about it that way. To me, it’s always just about, What do I naturally have that this character has, and what do I have to put on a little bit more? One of the things that Luke naturally has is that I’m a very open guy. I don’t think we find Aaron like that. He’s working to put up barriers and walls. He wants to be seen as kind of tough and aloof.
If he’s putting up those walls, what do you think brings him to Bobby?
We talked about that a lot. I revealed to Billy that I’d started listening to Las Culturistas a lot as prep. I don’t normally listen to it. It is an incredibly intimate thing to have people in your ear. Especially during the pandemic, they were like my friends that I would check in with and hear their opinions. On some level, Aaron, who probably doesn’t have a lot of close friends he talks about things on a deeper level with, probably takes a tremendous amount from that sort of private time that he has with Bobby Lieber on the Bobby Lieber podcast. He wanted Bobby, who he knows is really smart, to know that he’s smart too.
Given that you listened to Las Culturistas, it must have been fun to do the scene with Bowen.
Bowen was great. I think he’s one of the funniest guys out there. It was so fun that our movie literally goes from Harvey Fierstein to Bowen Yang, bookmarks of queer representation in culture.
There’s a lot of talk about this movie as an original, because it’s the first major studio-funded gay rom-com. There’s also a lot of talk about the straight rom-coms Bros looked to for inspiration. But where do you see Bros in a gay film lineage?
Where we exist in the gay lineage is that it’s going to be in major movie theaters. I grew up in the suburbs, where you could only see movies at the multiplex. The only way that I saw queer cinema as an 18-year-old kid growing up in Ontario was that my Jumbo Video happened to have a queer movie section that I was terrified to visit. The fact that it’s in a multiplex with 3,000 seats is important.
This movie is also clever in the way rom-coms of another generation were. Yes, it is broad. Yes, it has physical comedy. But it’s in that vein of Broadcast News and When Harry Met Sally: movies for adults. It’s a smart romantic comedy. But I know your question was about the queer community, so I’m trying to think about a queer rom-com.
It doesn’t have to be a rom-com. One thing I thought about during Bros’s conversations about being masc was the original version of The Boys in the Band.
Oh, interesting. Maybe the joyful answer to this is that we don’t spend the movie tearing each other apart, which we’ve done a lot of. But the question of masculinity is not totally singular to the queer experience. Even in that wonderful Channing Tatum movie that just came out on streaming with Sandra Bullock, Tatum’s character’s masculinity is in jeopardy. He’s all concerned about the way he looks and how he presents. These ideas of masculinity are in all aspects of culture.
You’ve played gay characters before, most notably on Brothers and Sisters. Does it feel different to be involved in something that is actively reaching to be set in a version of a modern gay life?
As opposed to a television set?
Bros has a sensibility to it that feels more akin to how actual gay people live — Grindr can be a plot point.
It’s weird, because when I was on Brothers and Sisters, I was 20. Now I’m like 40. It’s bizarre to now be in something that feels more of the time. But you also have to appreciate what sort of sandbox you’re playing in — this is a Judd Apatow film. It’s going to be current. It also has the specific comic voice of Billy Eichner, and Billy’s comic voice is around pop culture. What he’s brilliant at is making these observations about the larger culture. Like Hallmark movies.
I bet you get asked about that a lot.
It’s a part of my history.
Are there things you learned from being a romantic lead in Hallmark films that you brought to Bros?
There are technical aspects — I’ve been on a ton of sets. I know my way around intimate conversation. I’ve learned how to fall in love with a lot of different types of people. I don’t know what that says about me, but you get good at listening to people.
With Bros, Billy is the star and writer. How does that affect your dynamic when you’re supposed to be equals onscreen?
Aaron is drawn as a very different character. I do not compete for the space that he does at all. As an actor, he has a set of talents that are not things that I know how to do: He can deliver a rapid-fire dissertation about many, many things. He respects me as an actor and wanted that different energy from me. I think that’s what the sort of “opposites attract†thing is all about — finding something different and finding love in that.
You talked earlier about the person who you want to go see this movie: an 18-year-old gay kid who’s in the suburbs. But it’s going into theaters, and there aren’t enough 18-year-old gay kids to fill all those seats. How do you think about the broader audience for this film?
I brought my mother, my twin sister and her husband, and my older sister and her husband all to TIFF, and I listened to their laughter. My mom had a lot of questions about poppers, but she also said, “I feel like I understand a little bit more about where you come from.†She cried at the right places, and she laughed at things that were unexpected. She was talking about the boardroom scenes after, and she was like, “I laughed but I didn’t even know what half the jokes were about!†My mom gets it: Maybe I can understand my son a little bit more. Maybe I can understand why it’s taking him so long to meet somebody. I’m not like Aaron at all, but there’s a way she can understand me through this movie.
This interview has been edited and condensed.