[music]

David Remnick: You probably came across the comedian and actor, Billy Eichner the same way I did. Somebody probably sent you a video of this manic guy running around New York City, quizzing passers-by on questions like, is this a real Tyler, the Creator lyric or not? Did you hear that Madonna died and would you have sex with Paul Rudd for a dollar?

Billy Eichner: Let's go. Miss, for a dollar, would you have sex with Paul Rudd?

Participant: Of course, I would.

Billy Eichner: Yes, Thank you. Here's a dollar. Miss, for a dollar, would you have sex with Paul Rudd?

Participant: Yes.

Billy Eichner: Yes, here's a dollar.

David Remnick: Billy Eichner on the Street was designed to go viral and it did. Madonna even had the good sense not to sue him. A decade later, Billy Eichner is starring in a form of comedy that by contrast, you'd almost call serious and respectable. A romantic comedy called Bros.

Billy Eichner: I loved romcoms. I grew up in New York City, in Queens. My parents and I, one of the ways we bonded is by going to movies. I loved entertainment, loved Hollywood from a very young age. I don't know how that happened, but it just happened. I can't remember my life before I wasn't interested in that. There was a period of my life when my parents and I would go to the movies every single Saturday night, regardless of whether there was even something we really wanted to see or not. We were just big moviegoers and I loved romantic comedy. Those were honestly some of the movies I looked forward to seeing most and the movies I have returned to again and again over the years.

David Remnick: What were some of your favorites?

Billy Eichner: If you're old enough like me to remember when the major studios used to do sneak previews of movies, which they don't do anymore. They would show you the whole movie a week before it came out, and so my parents and I went to see a sneak preview of When Harry Met Sally at the Fresh Meadows Cineplex Odeon in Queens, I remember seeing Moonstruck, I remember seeing Working Girl, I remember watching Broadcast News and Tootsie, and just so many movies like that, which I love.

The Nora Ephron movie, Sleepless in Seattle. As I got older, You've Got Mail, My Best Friend's Wedding. Oh, I remember I saw Pretty Woman at the Lowe's [unintelligible 00:02:27] in Queens, on Queens Boulevard. I don't know why I have a-- I can tell you, I don't only remember the movies, but for some reason, especially with those movies, because I love them so much, I remember where I saw them. In some cases, I remember where I was sitting in the movie theater.

I was always a kid who, I don't know if it was because I was gay or smart or a bit of an overachiever, I always wanted to be an adult, and those movies made me feel like I was an adult, even though there were never any gay people in them.

David Remnick: Well, this is what we're heading toward, obviously. You're watching all these movies, one after the other, dozens of them, and at the same time, you're a young gay kid growing up and getting older and as they say now, constantly, you're not seeing yourselves on screen. How does that make you feel one way or another?

Billy Eichner: Well, as a kid, I wasn't really thinking about that. This was the '80s and the '90s. I didn't come out until I was in college. I obviously knew I was gay before that, but it wasn't something that was front of mind. At the time, I can't say I sat around and thought as a 12-year-old, why aren't there any gay people in Sleepless in Seattle? I was just following the story, but I was feeling it.

Now, looking back, it's true because in those movies, as much as I love them, if you're a gay guy or an LGBTQ person watching Sleepless in Seattle, for example, you're not quite the Tom Hanks and you're not quite the Meg Ryan, and yet you're longing to feel the way that those characters do and to have those experiences. Even though there weren't LGBTQ characters present in those movies at that time, they made me feel like there would be a world of smart adults out there going through complicated things involving love and relationships and affairs.

I just really wanted to be a part of that. Even though I wasn't seeing gay characters, I was seeing adults and I guess in my mind I connected that to a more sophisticated world than the one I was living in, where there would probably be a spot for me, even though I wasn't seeing myself specifically.

David Remnick: Billy, tell me about how this movie came about and why.

Billy Eichner: Well, strangely enough, Bros started with two straight men. The director and my co-writer, Nick Stoller, who I'd worked with as an actor a couple of times but never as a co-writer. He emailed me in, I believe, the fall of 2017 and said, "I want my next movie to be a romantic comedy," because he loves romcoms. He said he thought it would be cool if it was about a gay couple because he knew we hadn't gotten many of those, but he acknowledged, which I knew that he was a straight man and married to a woman for many years and they have three young daughters and leading what we would now refer to as a very heteronormative lifestyle.

He said, "I love working with you. Do you want to write it with me? If all goes well, you could star in it and I'll direct it." He mentioned that Judd Apatow, this blockbuster comedy producer, would hopefully probably come on board as our producer because Judd had also been looking for a story like this. Those two guys have made some of the biggest comedy blockbusters of the past 25 years between the two of them, Bridesmaids and 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors, Superbad. The list goes on and on.

David Remnick: Tell me about the process of writing the film. What was your intent? What you wanted to make sure was there? Because this is not just when Harry Met Sally becomes when Harry Met Harry or with the chromosome. Different things happen. Sexually, socially, it's different.

Billy Eichner: Absolutely. Honestly, that's exactly one of the first things I said to Nick when he came to me with the invitation. I said, "I'm very flattered. I've never starred at a movie before. I've never written a movie before. I don't know why you think I can do this. I obviously want to take you up on it. It's a huge opportunity for me and for the LGBTQ community because Judd and Nick are two guys on an increasingly short list that can get an R-rated comedy greenlit at a major studio and released in theaters."

I knew it was a huge opportunity, but I told him, right off the bat, I said, "The main thing is that the movie is laugh-out-loud funny. We're all comedy guys and that's our job, but also it has to be honest and it has to be authentic." I literally said to him, "If you think we can just do When Harry Met Sally and slip into guys and have the story play out the same way, I'm not interested."

David Remnick: What does that mean When Harry Met Sally? In other words, it's because it's too polite? It's too sedate? I would say there's marginally more group sex in your film than in When Harry Met Sally. I don't remember any orgies in that film.

Billy Eichner: No, no. I just think two men together is different. By the way, I think even for a lot of straight couples, especially a lot of younger straight couples, the old rules of those romantic comedies don't apply to them either. We are a more liberated society. I love those movies and I still love them, even though they read to me as a bit old-fashioned. What we were trying to do with Bros is give you that same uplifting, warm, comforting feeling that you get from the best of those movies, but update it and make it about a more modern contemporary couple. Also, we have to be careful. You can talk about gay men or LGBTQ people as a monolithic group.

David Remnick: In any way. Yes, in any way.

Billy Eichner: A lot of the gay men I know, especially compared to straight people or at least straight people as they're portrayed in the media and in culture, we play by our own rules sometimes.

David Remnick: Give me an example of that. Give me a scene that's an example of that, that there's no way you would find in a When Harry Met Sally.

Billy Eichner: At one point early in the movie, two of my best friends who had been dating for a while, they reveal that they're now in a throuple. That they are now, as a couple, dating a third person. My character isn't necessarily judgmental of thouples. My character's judgmental of romantic relationships in general.

David Remnick: [laughs]

Billy Eichner: Underneath there, there's a bit of a bitterness. I think there was once a line in the movie, "Wow, you found two. I can't find one."

David Remnick: I love the part-- There's a moment when one of the members of the throuple calls his parents imaginatively or otherwise and informs them that I'm now a verb that I can't use on the airwaves necessarily, two other guys, and the parents react with absolute acceptance and glee. Fantastic.

Billy Eichner: Oh, they're so thrilled. They're like, "Oh, you're finally in a throuple. We're so happy." Now that's almost like an Annie Hall-inspired fantasy sequence. It's also a reflection of an evolving world. I know a lot of throuples in real life. My best friends in the world are a married couple, two gay men. I was the witness at their wedding. They're two lifelong friends. They've been together 18 years, married 10 years, but have now been in a throuple with a third man for about six or seven years which I always tell them is three times as long as I've ever been in a relationship with one other person.

David Remnick: There's also the notion of a gender reveal orgy.

Billy Eichner: My boyfriend tells me that he's going to a gender reveal orgy. That a married gay couple he knows is having a baby through a surrogate. They're announcing the gender to the world by having a gender reveal orgy, not just a party. We are both mocking and spoofing and celebrating what I tend to think is a very sexually liberated gay population. Now, I also know tons of gay friends in monogamous relationships with each other that you could call it heteronormative or old-fashioned or traditional whatever word. I know plenty of those too. I don't want to paint a picture here as gay men as these out-of-control, promiscuous, crazy people.

Here's what happens. When culture and society at large for the vast majority of human existence does not want to talk about the private lives of gay people and LGBTQ people and essentially erases us from the mainstream narrative, from textbooks, from history, two things happen. A, it can traumatize that population to a certain degree. That's the negative. If there is a positive that comes out of society ignoring you or scapegoating you or vilifying you whatever you want to say, it means that you end up saying you know what, I don't want to curse. forget it.

We're going to go make up our own rules. We're going to do what feels good to us. Marriage may not be the answer. It's lovely to have the ability to marry each other now.

We certainly all deserve e equal protection under the law, but maybe we don't want to get married ever. Maybe we want to get married and continue to have sex with other people and that works for us. Maybe we have an open relationship without getting married. Maybe we're polyamorous. The culture ignoring us for a long time gave us the ability to go in a dark corner and decide what felt good to us.

I think that's a wonderful thing about being part of the queer community because those old-fashioned rules of those romcoms that I grew up loving, I love watching them and they maybe work for some people but even among straight people, they don't work. We all know how many straight relationships fall apart. I think that's what we're reflecting in Bros.

The premise that Judd Apatow and Nick Stoller and I started off with was what happens when two 40-something-year-old gay men who have both been out their whole lives are very sexually active but have put romance and intimacy at arm's length.

These characters, both me and my love interest Aaron played by Luke McFarland, We at the beginning of the movie pride ourselves on being impenetrable. They're both learning to be vulnerable. The idea that we started off with was what happens when two men who pride themselves on not needing romance, who pride themselves on being self-reliant which is something that LGBTQ folks have always had to be. What happens when those two men in the middle of their lives meet someone for the first time and really fall in love?

Participant: Honestly, I was impressed. You may be more emotionally unavailable than I am.

Participant: Maybe we can be emotionally unavailable together.

Participant: Who's writing your texts, Maroon 5?

Participant: Fuck off.

Participant: Kidding. We can go out. Are you asking me out?

Participant: I'm down for whatever.

Participant: Same.

Participant: Cool.

Participant: Sounds good.

Participant: So tomorrow or we can do whenever.

Participant: Yes, I can do whenever and I can do whatever.

Participant: don't care what we do.

Participant: Me neither.

David Remnick: At a certain point, Hollywood felt very proud of itself for having movies with as it were, gay themes. Philadelphia came out rokeback Mountain, they used straight actors, Tom Hanks, and the rest. It seemed to me that even though you were working with a co-writer and a director who's straight, with Judd Apatow who is as well that casting was another matter. Talk to me about your decisions about casting because I believe the vast majority of the cast that you work with is gay, queer with the exception of Debra Messing and Kristin Chenoweth.

Billy Eichner: With the exception of a few celebrity cameos, which are really some of the highlights of the movie. They just crush. It's so funny. All the main and supporting roles in the movie are all played by openly LGBTQ actors. Even the straight characters in the movie are played by openly LGBTQ actors. That's something that with this particular movie being the first of its kind, the first R-rated gay rom-com from a major studio. It's going to be playing in movie theaters.

In big multiplexes, the same ones that played Batman and Spider-Man are going to have this Judd Apatow produced R-rated gay rom-com playing in them. That is enormous amount of access and reach that movies like this have never gotten before. It took way too long to get here, but I wanted to take advantage of that moment and to say LGBTQ actors have been left out of this equation for so long and no one's making any rules about gay should play gay and straight should play straight.

It's acting. It's art. Art is a liberating force. You don't want to put any strict rules on it. The whole fun of acting for both actors and the audiences to watch actors transform into someone else, that's all true. I don't think there should be any strict regulations on who plays what. However, art, especially major studio films are a big business. They are not made in a vacuum.

Historically, the most high-profile LGBTQ roles, the ones that were visible, the ones that did get marketing, the ones that did get a lot of media attention. The ones that got big awards campaigns built around them. In almost all those scenarios, all those roles are played by straight movie stars. Some of those performances were magnificent, no one's arguing with how wonderful Sean Penn was in Milk or Tom Hanks in Philadelphia or Heath Ledger and Brokeback Mountain.

The list goes on. However, we never got to play our own roles ever. Maybe in indie films we did but those films were never given the financial support that they needed to get to a wider audience to get the type of distribution that a Brokeback Mountain or a Philadelphia or even a Milk would get. We took this as an opportunity with Bros to say first of all, so many of the movies you made Hollywood were about the tragedy of being gay, the suffering, the closet, aids.

I think actors were drawn to those roles especially straight actors because giving them the benefit of the doubt, they wanted to bring gay stories to the screen. Also, I think they saw them as ways that they could really prove their acting chops with watch me as a straight man that you all know transform myself into this gay victim. Everyone won awards and got a claim and all of this stuff and we were left out.

David Remnick: Was that maddening to you?

Billy Eichner: Overtime to the degree that it had happened, yes because it never worked in the reverse. Openly LGBTQ actors never got to play the main straight roles in big movies. Then we're also not getting to play the main gay roles.

David Remnick: Unless they were closeted. Unless it was Rock Hudson.

Billy Eichner: Sure, but that's a different thing.

David Remnick: That's tragic in its own way.

Billy Eichner: Tragic in its own way. For so long, LGBTQ people in Hollywood actors and also even people behind the scenes, writers, directors, especially if you wanted to work on films or TV shows of a certain scale that weren't small, low-budget films you had two choices up until I don't know, 10 years ago. You could be bold enough to come out of the closet and everyone would pat you on the back and say that's so brave and so bold.

Then they wouldn't give you a job, or you could stay in the closet like Rock Hudson and many of those guys and women and trans people, that you could stay in the closet and you could maybe work and become a movie star if you were lucky, like Rock Hudson did but you had to lead some strange double life. Those guys were being set up in fake relationships with women so the public thought they were straight so they could continue to pursue their professional and artistic dreams. Those were the two options. Those are terrible options. That's not a humane thing to do to a person.

David Remnick: Billy, I know you've been staying up. I know because I've read it, that you've been staying up worrying that the film might not appeal to a huge audience because this is not a cheap movie. You didn't make it with a video camera and two light bulbs. Universals got a romcom coming out soon called Ticket to Paradise/ got George Clooney and Julia Roberts and nobody's going to be asking Julia Roberts and George Clooney in their interviews are they worried that gay people are going to come to see their movie?

Billy Eichner: Exactly.

David Remnick: What's your concern here and what do you think is going to happen?

Billy Eichner: I don't worry about whether the movie appeals to straight people. We just had our world premiere, the Toronto International Film Festival in a theater full of 1,700 people, the vast majority of whom were straight because the vast majority of the audience is still straight. You don't hear about it much but straight people are still out there and thriving. We've had so many screenings across the country over the past few months, test screenings and screenings for press.

They love the movie. For some reason because of COVID and maybe just a change in the way content is served up. Hollywood decided a few years ago that comedy is something that you watch at home by yourself. All these comedy films are now getting released to streaming platforms. Yes, that's very convenient and lovely. Of course, I watch a lot of stuff at home too, as we all do, but I am telling you, we have forgotten how much fun it is to sit with other people and laugh and cry and be moved together as a group.

I don't worry about it appealing to straight audiences. What I worry about is whether a straight audience sees the trailer for Bros and thinks, "Oh wow. A movie about a gay couple. That's for me, I'll be able to relate to that." I know that they will. I hope that they realize that because Hollywood has not conditioned them to think these movies are for everyone because they never made movies like this that were for everyone and given this level of distribution.

That's what I worry about. I hope that straight people, anyone who wants to see a good comedy and laugh out loud embraces this, even if you're not seeing yourself reflected specifically because like I said, as a kid from, as an adult even, all the romcoms I saw were always about straight people. Yet, I related. I laughed, I cried. I wanted to be up on screen. There's no reason to think straight people shouldn't have that same experience when it's a gay couple, but there's not much of a precedent for it. That's where the fear comes in. I hope that I'm worrying for no reason, but I'd be lying to say I wasn't worried.

David Remnick: Billy Eichner, thank you so much.

Billy Eichner: Thank you very much for having me.

David Remnick: Bros is opening in the theaters this weekend, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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