It was a Dior death match at Out’s photo shoot of Bros stars Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane. On a recent Saturday afternoon, the actors arm-wrestled in designer plaid shirts before jumping into a freestanding copper tub in the middle of Bathtub Gin LA, a Prohibition-style speakeasy located in the middle of Tinseltown. Framed by butterfly wallpaper and a wall of booze, the pair then toasted glasses of brown stuff (which was, in fact, just iced coffee).
The space was filled with eclectic vintage items: a taxidermy possum, an Imperial typewriter, a yellowed 1929 issue of the New York Times. Music piped in, alternately, between a Bluetooth speaker and an old grand piano, from which a team member played a few bars of Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis” and the theme song of Jurassic Park.
The dinosaur franchise was also on the mind of Eichner, who marveled that Bros — the first gay romantic comedy to be released in theaters by a major studio — shares the Universal Pictures umbrella with blockbusters like Jurassic World: Dominion and Minions: The Rise of Gru. How does it feel for him to break this gay glass ceiling?
“It feels really exciting, and I’m very grateful to have the opportunity,” says the 43-year-old actor, who also admits to carrying some “anger and confusion and curiosity” as to why it took a purportedly progressive industry until 2022 to reach this milestone. ( also made history as a gay rom-com from a major studio released on a streaming service, Hulu, earlier this year; was poised to earn this distinction for queer women in 2020, but its distribution was disrupted by the pandemic.) “I keep making jokes like, ‘Oh, Hollywood made two movies about an animated talking hedgehog before they made one major studio rom-com about a gay couple.’ And that’s a funny joke, and it gets a big laugh, but it’s also bizarre that is, in fact, the case.”
