Jason Sudeikis: Sudeikis & Tell

Currently in his seventh season as a Saturday Night Live cast member, Jason Sudeikis stays humble as he promotes his first lead film role opposite Owen Wilson in Hall Pass, a Farrelly brothers buddy comedy in theaters February 25. But the 35-year-old recurring 30 Rock star, who also voices a gay character on Fox’s The Cleveland Show, is happy to brag about bumping mustaches with Jon Hamm and tasting Zac Efron’s foot.

 

The Advocate: Do you Google yourself, Jason?
Jason Sudeikis: Every day, now that I’ve learned how to spell my last name. Why?

I found that a quick search for “Jason Sudeikis shirtless” will direct you to some particularly rabid gay fans.
[Laughs] Yes, I have been made aware of that, and it’s flattering. I don’t think it’s all that interesting to see me shirtless, but what can you do?

Do guys ever hit on you?
I think so. No guy’s offered to whisk me away on a boat to some amazing island, unfortunately, but I have been high-fived a few times with a thoughtful, lingering glance.

Especially when you grew a mustache for your supporting parts in The Bounty Hunter and Going the Distance, I’m sure.
Gay guys, straight guys — everybody looks at you a little differently when you’re rocking a mustache with no sense of irony.

Growing up in Kansas, what was your first exposure to gay people?
This is going to sound so hackneyed, but my mom took me and my sisters to a lot of theater when I was growing up. My mom also played a lot of Broadway show tunes in her car — Dreamgirls, The Fantasticks, and all that Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff — so I knew all the words to La Cage aux Folles by the age of 10. I grew up in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, which has a very big gay community. Both my younger sisters took dance classes, and I had a hunch that some of their instructors and friends in that circle were gay. Besides that, I also saw the movie A Chorus Line a whole shitload of times before puberty even set in.

Tell me about the SNL sketch in which you kissed Jon Hamm on the hog.
Well, technically I kissed him on the mouth, but — oh, you mean the motorcycle. SNL already has those “Kissing Family” sketches, where the joke is that the family is way too into each other, so Jon and I agreed in rehearsal, “Let’s not play this for laughs with slapping tongues. Let’s kiss for real. We’ll bump mustaches and kiss like we mean it.” So that’s what we did. A lot of people didn’t know what to make of it because it seemed to come out of nowhere — did they go through all that just for the kiss? — but we were having a good time playing the satire of CHiPs. These guys were happily married to women, but they got caught up in the moment, riding around on a motorcycle through the beautiful foliage. The sketch was written by James Anderson, one of our gay writers, and Michael O’Brien, one of our straight writers, and they delighted in the details of the scene beyond just building to a kiss between two of Liz Lemon’s ex-boyfriends.