Billy Eichner got emotional filming Bros gay rom-com scenes 'the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan' did
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While Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were busy dating through email or missing out on sleep in Seattle, Billy Eichner was watching in the audience, dreaming of the day he'd see Bobby meet Aaron the way Harry met Sally on the big screen.
Over the last few decades, not much has changed for romantic comedy couples at the studio level. Sure, Kissing Jessica Stein, Love, Simon, and Happiest Season came and went on the indie scene or in the streaming universe, but Eichner is proudly blazing a trail for queer stories with Universal, the same company known for flexing blockbuster might as it pushes fast and furious vehicles and man-eating dinosaurs to screens around the world.
There, Eichner and co-writer/director Nick Stoller — a straight filmmaker who approached the Billy on the Street personality to write a gay rom-com — teamed with Judd Apatow five years ago to create Bros, a movie about the emotionally "impenetrable" Bobby (Eichner), a podcaster-turned-LGBTQ-history-museum-founder who balks at the thought of finding love — until he meets a strapping professional, Aaron (Hallmark and Killjoys star Luke Macfarlane), and the pair begin chipping away at their hardened exteriors.
"We're not doing a sitcom. This is not as simple as doing When Harry Met Sally or some Hallmark Christmas movies and just swapping in two gay guys for the straight couple and having everything play out the same way," says Eichner. "In my experience and the experience of my friends, that's not how it works. There's some overlap in gay and straight relationships, but there's a lot that's different."
Such as the central pair dealing with internalized homophobia, toxic masculinity, and repressed victimization in a heteronormative world — and while it's not exactly romance material on the surface, Bros is all about flipping the script. Brimming with odes to classic rom-coms, it also allows for the nuances of queer love rarely explored on such a scale in Hollywood.
"You have scenes where Luke and I are walking around on the Upper West Side, on what really felt like a scene out of a Nora Ephron rom-com that I grew up loving, but were never about gay couples, says Eichner, featured on EW's Pride cover. "We weren't even on the sidelines in most of those movies — there wasn't even a gay best friend at that point."
"To think that there was this huge crew and a major studio budget that wasn't enormous, but was much more than what LGBTQ people have gotten in the past...to know we had sweeping crane shots of me and Luke walking hand-in-hand on Central Park West, the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan did, was so moving for me."
Universal Pictures Billy Eichner with the cast of 'Bros.'
Eichner cast the film with actors who enhanced its authenticity, from popular personalities like Ts Madison, Miss Lawrence, and RuPaul's Drag Race winner Symone to comedy staples like Bowen Yang and Harvey Fierstein. It was an opportunity not only to enhance visibility for the community but also to get talented LGBTQ performers jobs that paid.
"We must've read every single openly LGBTQ actor for this movie," Eichner says, adding that he and Stoller were so impressed with trans actress Eve Lindley's audition tape that they created a new role for her. "What was astonishing is that Nick and I kept looking at the audition tapes and watching auditions thinking, my God, there's so much queer talent out there that has never been properly given the opportunities they deserve."
Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane in 'Bros'
It was also imperative that Eichner cast a gay man as his romantic interest. And the search for the right actor to play Aaron, he says, was challenging at first.
"I just assumed that my love interest had to be played by a big movie star, which would mean a straight man because we don't have any openly gay movie stars in America. We have TV stars, a lot of openly gay actors, but a movie star, we've never had an openly gay Ryan Reynolds, or an openly gay Paul Rudd, or an openly gay Kevin Hart, they just do not exist," Eichner says. "Hollywood did not allow for it. When we all started talking about it, we all decided that that wouldn't be the right thing to do for this movie, it wouldn't be the right thing ethically, the right thing creatively, we're doing a movie where you have this through-line about how LGBTQ people have been erased from history, so it would be so hypocritical."
The resulting product, he feels, is an "opportunity to correct that imbalance" of straight stars co-opting gay love. It's a course correction for mainstream cinema — not just for representation, but for crafting well-rounded, messy, and downright hilarious queer characters who don't seek to make "standard" rom-com audiences comfortable. It's also a rare, full-fledged, and unsanitized exploration of the nuances of gay romance on a large stage.
"The gay relationships we see played out in TV and in the media often are very sweet and a little bit two-dimensional and very not threatening. We're wearing cutesy little outfits, strolling hand-in-hand, and it's very sweet and asexual," Eichner explains. "They seem very sexless to me in a way that I don't recognize as being real — or, we're promiscuous and completely obsessed with sex and drugs, it's the other extreme. We're soulless, we have no romance, we're just nightlife creatures. No, we're all of these things because we're multi-dimensional humans who want all of these things depending on the day, depending on the night."
Bros hits theaters on Sept. 30. For more on how gay entertainers are remixing the rom-com genre, read our full Pride cover story with Eichner and Fire Island star Joel Kim Booster.
Ryan Pfluger for Entertainment Weekly Billy Eichner
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