Big Gay Following: Patrick Dempsey

Tweaking the plot of My Best Friend’s Wedding, your character in Made of Honor acts as his best girlfriend’s Maid of Honor so that he can sabotage her wedding. Has it always been your dream to play the “Julia Roberts” roles?
They’re a lot of fun to do. Growing up, I never had the chance to go to the movies much, so everything that I would see was probably on PBS. They would do classic comedies -- a lot of Cary Grant, Errol Flynn stuff -- and all the slapstick really appealed to me. We really wanted to pull from that.

Do you have a Rupert Everett-like gay best friend?
[Laughs] He’s not like Rupert Everett, but yeah, I definitely do. He’s a good guy, but it took him a long time to really get out of the closet. Everyone around him knew, and then when he finally came to terms with it and said, “Yeah, I’m gay,” we were like, “Finally! Good for you.” You could see the release in him where he wasn’t having to pretend anymore and was becoming his own person.

We’re not talking about T.R., are we?
No, no, no. It’s somebody else.

Um, OK. In Made of Honor’s opening flashback scenes, you eerily look 10 years younger.
Well, the great thing about technology now is that they can go in and take the lines away with computers, which was comforting. [Laughs] It was kind of scary, too, because I was like, Oh God, I don’t want to go back to that time in my life when I looked so young. I’m very happy to be the age that I am, so to go back and see those scenes was a little unsettling.

Your character often gets mistaken for gay, which also happens to your character in 1989’s Loverboy. Has that happened to you in real life?
Sometimes now, yeah. I try not to read the blogs, but it seems everybody’s convinced I’m gay -- especially since Versace. But the great thing with sexuality and being gay is that there’s really no stereotype anymore.

Meanwhile, you’re a cyclist, you race cars, and as seen in Made of Honor, you’re good at basketball. We get it, Patrick -- you’re butch. What are some of your more feminine hobbies or qualities?
[Laughs] That’s a good question. I haven’t really thought about it. Oh, man, I cry at the drop of a hat. Everything makes me very emotional. I try not to be a metrosexual or get too caught up in grooming, but in my house, with my wife and everything, there’s always stuff going on with products and things like that -- not that that’s feminine; that’s just sort of modern society.

How can you avoid grooming when you’re so known for your hair?
I know, but I hate dealing with my hair. I just like to put on a hat to go outside.

At 17, you dropped out of high school to play David in a San Francisco production of Torch Song Trilogy. Did you or your parents have concerns about your taking a gay part so early in your career?
No, not at all. Doing theater, the gay community was always incredibly kind to me -- never aggressive or predatory, always supportive and nurturing. That was the great thing about being a part of that show. Especially being so young, there was a lot of concern only because I was out there on my own and I’d never been in the big city before, but everybody looked after me.

Growing up in Maine, were you teased because of your interest in the arts?
Oh, yeah, I got a lot of teasing early on -- a lot of comments and abuse -- because I was performing in a vaudeville troupe. In a small town, people can be aggressive that way just because they don’t understand and they’re threatened by someone doing their own thing. It actually taught me a lot and helped me in the long run, because then I stopped worrying about what people thought of me.