10 Years Later, the Cast of 'Looking' Look Back

It's been 10 years since HBO premiered "Looking," the sitcom about three gay friends (and a straight woman) looking for love in San Francisco. The cast, creator, and some of the crew looked back on the trailblazing series, recalling how unique it was at the time and sharing memories of douching, dildos, sex scenes, and close friendships between the straight and gay actors, in a recent profile of the show for GQ.

As 2014 dawned, the GQ article noted, PrEP was something new, Grindr was just taking off, and those looking for some serious LGBTQ+ representation on TV didn't have a lot to choose from. "Looking" was a show of the moment and for the moment – and it was the first "gay" show that HBO had done.

There was an expectation, created by the show's marketing, that "looking" would be a gay "Sex and the City," which had ended its run a decade earlier but had entered the realm of movies and remained a cultural touchstone. It was not an apt comparison – "Looking" had actually been intended to stand apart from shows like "Sex and the City" and "Queer as Folk" by delving under the surface, hewing closer to reality, and focusing in intimacy over glamor.

Not that parallels couldn't be drawn. "Looking" centered around four close friends, each of them with distinct characteristics and ambitions; moreover, the search for love by a romantically indecisive central character was baked into the premise; and, perhaps most like "SATC," elements of the cultural conversation (party drugs, HIV, dance floor cruising, body shaming and body affirmation), as well as bits and pieces of real people's personal lives (arguments the actors had during breakups with significant others, for instance), found their way into the episodes. Subjects never before broached on TV were fair game in the quest for comic gold and dramatic depth.

Take douching, for instance: In one episode, Jonathan Groff's character, the constantly needy and indecisive Patrick, wants to get himself ready for anal sex with boss-turned-boyfriend Kevin (Russell Tovey). Like his character, Groff wasn't quite sure how to go about finding the right sort of product – so, he did what any gay actor researching the subject might do: He took a straight buddy, co-star Frankie Alvarez, on a shopping trip.

"What we did in the show, where we go to the Walgreens? We actually did [that] in the West Village in real life, where he walked with me to get a fucking anal douche, and also a dildo to experiment with," Groff told GQ. "He was in the gay sex shop with me, doing that in real life."

Said Alvarez, "It was a moment of vulnerability, where he wanted to go dildo shopping, but he didn't want to be alone."

"He could have called any number of his gay friends, but he called me," Alvarez added. "And it was a testament to our friendship that he trusted me, that even though I was straight, he understood that he had a supportive friend there through that time."

Groff spoke to how the show helped him fully embrace authenticity. "I was out but I was, in a big way, not fully accepting myself," the actor explained. "I came out of the closet because it felt more painful to be in than out at that point, but I didn't really feel myself own who I was until I had had the experience of 'Looking.'"

If "Looking" was anything like the other show it was compared to, Showtime's "Queer as Folk," it was in the "Is he or isn't he?" fun of trying to guess who in the cast was gay or straight in real life. Australian actor Murray Bartlett, who played would-be restauranteur Dom, was openly gay; English actor Russell Tovey had never been in the closet during his career. But what about Raúl Castillo, who played Patrick's other love interest, the confidently queer Richie? (Straight... but not at all bothered by gay roles, as subsequent parts in movies like "The Inspection" and "Cassandro.")

"There are really few romantic lead[s] for Latino actors," Castillo told GQ, "....especially 10 years ago. So for me, it was just really exciting to play a character who was ethnically very specific, who was a three-dimensional complex character." But revealing he was straight to his romantic scene partner felt, Castillo intimated, like a delicate task. He chose to frame the disclosure in terms of how Richie and Patrick would fall in love at first meeting, much as he and his wife had. "I was revealing to him that I was straight and he didn't bat a lash," Castillo recalled. "He took it in, he listened and yeah, it was funny, because it was almost like a coming out."

Alvarez – who played Agustín, the third leg of the show's trio of male friends – was also, as noted above, straight. He was also more a theater actor up to that point. "I was just plucked from obscurity" Alvarez told GQ, "and then all of a sudden" he had his "first role on camera where I speak. It's like, sign the papers, sign the contract, and then I take off my clothes and I'm making out with O-T Fagbenle"  – the actor who played Frankie's boyfriend – "and asking him to move in with me, you know?"

Lauren Weedman, who played the core cast's fourth member, Doris, was straight, but there were definite parallels between Doris and Weedman's real life. "I'm just surrounded by gay men – it's all my best friends, all of my first boyfriends," she told GQ. "When people are like, 'Oh, you're so good at doing that character,' I was like, 'Well, it's basically me.'"

For Bartlett, part of the appeal the actor brought come casting time was his trademark pornstache, which, the actor revealed, he had out of a stroke pure coincidence. "My partner at the time was working on a film with this filmmaker in Egypt – he's Egyptian – and he was going there for a chunk of time, during the revolution, the Arab Spring. And I decided to step away from everything and just go with him and learn Arabic." In order to "try and fit in" with the men there, Bartlett cultivated his mustache, which he still had "when the audition for 'Looking' came up."

"I did my first taped audition from Cairo with a mustache," Bartlett added, "which I'm pretty sure had a big role in me getting the role of Dom."

Series creator Michael Lannon and director Andrew Haigh told tales of their own. Though Lannon's original concept was somewhat different than what "Looking" eventually became, he landed a meeting at HBO and sold the pilot on the strength of his characters. "There wasn't anything with gay characters in the leads at that time," Lannon noted of the television landscape. "We also felt that there were sort of big generational shifts that had happened and were happening. It was sort of an in-between generation – things weren't life and death, nor were they super easy in terms of understanding your place in the world as a queer person."

Haigh who made the gay indie "Greek Pete" in 2009 but had only broken through with "Weekend" in 2011, was a novice to American television.

"HBO contacted me and said, 'Would you be interested in reading this pilot?' I'd only made 'Weekend,' which was a tiny, tiny thing. Then suddenly I was on a fancy plane going to L.A. You know what I mean? It was fantastic," Haigh – who went on to make acclaimed movies like "45 Years" and "All of Us Strangers" – the latter of which is enjoying considerable buzz right now – recalled.

With its narrative mix of characters and its behind-the-scenes blend of queer and straight talent, the show seems, from here, like it was well-poised to tell stories that would engage viewers from any and all stripes of the rainbow flag. But "Looking" was a rare oasis of representation at the time, and expectations were high – unrealistically so.

"When it's one of the few things that gets to represent a queer perspective, then everyone wants it to be everything," Bartlett observed. "And it was never intended to be that – and it would've been a mistake, I think, for it to be intended to be that."

"It's a lot of burden of representation, that you can feel sometimes," Haigh said. "It's quite heavy."

That, the article noted, put the show in an unfortunate position from the very start. Most damning, GQ recalled, was the label of "boring" that was unfairly slapped onto the show – a label that turned potential viewers off without them having seen a single episode.

"But have you watched it?" Tovey recalled asking people he talked with during location shooting in San Francisco. "They were like, 'No.'"

"It's in your city and it's about you," the actor added, as though arguing with people who ought to have been the show's fanbase.

In the end, "Looking" only ran two seasons before being cancelled thanks to its low ratings. It did, however, see its storylines tied up with a big red bow in the form of a TV movie, which Andrew Haigh also directed.

But the show's echoes resonate still, much as a sense of struggle and fierce determination for equality resonated for the cast during the show's production.

"I think we felt, making 'Looking' [in San Francisco], that there was a sort of responsibility to try and do justice to that city and to tap into that history and that kind of joy and pain and all the things that have allowed us to be freer and have some of the rights that we have now," Bartlett reflected. "You couldn't help feeling that there. It was a privilege."

Though, Russell Tovey pointed out, it's wise never to say never. "Let's do 'The Comeback,'" he suggested, noting the decade-long gap between the first and second seasons of the Lisa Kudrow sitcom and asking, reasonably enough, "so why can't 'Looking' come back?"