You mentioned the truck stop
restroom scene in season 3, but that wasn’t the first time in your
career that you’d played a closeted gay man getting attacked from
behind in a bathroom.

Oh, in American Psycho? I think I was
attacking Christian Bale! [Laughs] No, you’re right. He came in the
bathroom to kill me and I turned around and kissed him. So it was sort
of the same, only last time I was singing Les Misérables.


Are there any gay characters in Renaissance Men, the screenplay you’ve written with Rainn Wilson about Renaissance fairs?

You
really have done your research! As of now, there are no gay characters.
That script is something that Rainn and I actually based on another
script we had written where there was a gay couple, but we went back
and forth about that a lot, frankly. One of my favorite movies of all
time is a British movie called Withnail & I, and there’s a fantastic
character in that who is gay. We were going for something complex like
that, but I felt very insecure about it because there’s a fine line
between having characters who happen to be gay and who do stuff that’s
comedic and having gay characters where gay people feel you’re making
fun of them. The way our characters were written was the antithesis of
that, but I was still worried about it. I would worry the same way if I
were writing an African-American character, just because I’m not
African-American. It’s a tricky thing that goes back to what you said
earlier about people looking to have their community positively
represented. Not that it’s the function of comedy or drama to do
anything other than portray people in a nuanced, realistic manner, but
I definitely worry about things like that.