Billy Eichner Opens Up About 'Bros' and Being Gay in Hollywood

Billy Eichner revealed a very consistent, and very gay, personal arc in a recent interview in which he discussed "Bros," homophobia in Hollywood, and his next big gay project.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Eichner revealed how homophobia in Hollywood – both in the town's behind-the-camera machinations and the messaging of the movies – affected him when he was just starting out his career.

A onetime self-described "theater kid growing up in New York" whose dream was to succeed on Broadway, Eichner noted that budding performers "don't sit there as a kid thinking, 'Oh, I could be the star of this movie, if only I wasn't gay.'"

Indeed, Eichner explained, "I went to see Steve Martin and Tom Hanks movies and I thought, 'Oh, I could do something like that.' It was only when I was in my mid-twenties when I started to think, 'Oh, I guess I'll be lucky if I can just play the neighbor on a sitcom.' Because that's what Hollywood was telling me."

That's what the business kept on telling him as a young hopeful looking for his big break on the Great White Way.

"In 2006, I had a manager who represented a lot of Broadway talent," Eichner recalled. "And she said, 'I'm inviting big agents to your next stage show. Can you make it a little less gay this month?' And I was shocked."

"It was insulting, and also impractical," Eichner added, "because that would be like literally changing my entire personality. I said, 'You don't really know what you're dealing with, because I have a little bit of a rebellious streak, and I'm not going to deal with that shit.' And they signed me anyway."

The best revenge, of course, is making a name for yourself doing unapologetically gay sketch comedy, but even better than that might be writing your own big-budget, unapologetically gay rom-com. Eichner has done both – the latter with "Bros," a story about an openly gay media personality (played by Eichner) meeting Mr. Right and falling head over heels for him, albeit reluctantly.

He said today's crop of rom-coms have left him wondering, "Where are the adults?" Eichner also specified a few of his longtime favorite comedic films but lamented that, "as much as I love all those movies – 'Broadcast News,' 'Moonstruck,' 'Annie Hall,' 'Tootsie' – LGBTQ people are literally completely ignored and erased in those worlds. We weren't even the best friend!"

There's much more representation now, but the actor and screenwriter suggested that it too often falls short, noting that "we've spent a lot of our time as queer people telling stories about ourselves while being concerned that we're palatable to straight audiences." Perhaps as a result, when Eichner sees LGBTQ+ characters, he doesn't recognize much about them that strikes him as realistic. Saying "it's all done with this satirical veil," the comedian noted, "There's an archness to so many of the gay male characters we get. And one of my goals with 'Bros' was, I wanted to be as funny as I've been before, or funnier, but funny in a different way. I wanted to lose that archness. I wanted the characters to feel like fully fleshed-out, complicated, funny, sad, three-dimensional people."

Along with that more genuine representation, Eichner wanted to present a view of gay men as romantically complex – and not in the same ways as heterosexual people are. "Two men together is a very unique, specific romantic situation," the comedian argued. "Because yes, we're gay. But we're still men. I think straight people think we're basically women. We are men!"

To illustrate his point, Eichner added: "I always say to my straight male friends, 'Think about all the weird, fucked-up male shit you have in your brain, about sex and monogamy and being vulnerable, and now times that by two.'"

If Eichner's persona and career show a certain overall consistency at this point, don't expect a radical departure from his tendency to center his projects on unvarnished gayness any time soon. He's already started work with Paul Rudnick on his next film, a project for Amazon, about one of the inevitable side-effects of marriage equality: Divorce among gay couples.

"What if we did a gay version of [the 1989 Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner film] 'The War of the Roses?'" Eichner described his thinking process to Rolling Stone.

"Just because we can get married doesn't mean that marriage is the answer to everything for gay people, and that all those marriages are gonna work out," Eichner went on to add. "And I think there's a certain pressure on LGBTQ people who get married to really try to work it out. So I thought the idea of a gay divorce would be really funny."

That project is named with the same deadpan brevity as "Bros," the title being "Ex-Husbands."

"Bros" hits theaters Sept. 30. Watch the preview below.