Interview Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane discuss their new LGBTQ+ fi lm Bros.

FILM

INTERVIEW

‘Let’s make the funniest movie we can make’

Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane discuss their new LGBTQ+ fi lm Bros, which brings equal parts comedy and authenticity to theaters.

By ADAM MULLINS-KHATIB

Bros, directed by Nicholas Stoller, written by Northwestern alumnus Billy Eichner and Stoller, is a fi lm that prides itself on a couple of fi rsts: the fi rst romantic comedy from a major studio focusing on gay men and Eichner as the fi rst openly gay man to write and star in a studio picture. Featuring an LGBTQ+ principal cast, the fi lm hilariously threads the needle in its portrayal of common complications across all romantic relationships, while never sacrifi cing the uniqueness of LGBTQ+ experiences.

I sat down with Eichner and costar Luke Macfarlane—who play protagonists Bobby and Aaron, respectively—to discuss the joy of the theatrical experience, bringing the fi lm from idea to reality, and the exuberant messiness of loving both complicated people and communities. What follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Adam Mullins-Khatib: When you spoke to the audience after the screening last night, you spoke to the importance of sitting together in a theater and laughing. What does that really mean to you?

Billy Eichner: I think we’ve forgotten how much fun it is to sit in a movie theater with people and laugh for a couple of hours, you know? It’s an experience I grew up having all the time that we took for granted. A lot of the movies that get released in theaters are pretty dark and gritty and cynical, or they’re harm movies, you know, they’re meant to scare people. And I love a lot of those movies, nothing against those movies, but, you know, there’s something about experiencing [comedy] with hundreds of other people that I think is very comforting and delightful and makes you feel good about life. So, I hope that Bros gives people that experience. Luke Macfarlane: Again, we were for the last maybe fi ve to six minutes kind of waiting in the hallway and listening, and I forgot how much I like listening to people respond to something. I’ve seen the movie enough times now that I can not just watch a movie, but also listen to the audience watch the movie. And that’s delightful, absolutely delightful.

I love all kinds of movies, but it’s sad, losing that experience of just being in that room and laughing together, not just being nervous or scared or anxious together.

Eichner: Right, or suffering through a fourhour movie together. And, for LGBTQ movies, the few that we’ve got, they’ve so often been about the suffering of being gay. About the torture of the closet. They’re period pieces about tortured gay, gay cowboy, queer people, and we’re getting beaten up and we’re dying of several di erent diseases, and we’re being played by straight male movie stars. So, we don’t even get to play the roles where we’re dying! And look, those stories are important to tell . . . but we also fall in love and make each other laugh a lot. My experience of being gay is and has been pretty joyful. Most of the time when it has been complicated or challenging, it’s been in the way that being a human is complicated and challenging for everyone straight or LGBTQ. So again, this is a rare movie, and I’m glad to be giving people that experience and I hope they take us up on it.

Were there any particular points that struck you as critical in the development process of bringing this idea from inception to the theaters?

Eichner: Sort of, yeah. You know it’s the fi rst movie I’ve ever written and the fi rst movie I’ve ever starred in. But, I didn’t make it by myself. I made it with two very experienced guys who made a lot of great major studio comedies, Judd Apatow and Nick Stoller. Bridesmaids, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and the list goes on and on.

I love those movies. We’re comedy guys, fi rst and foremost, you don’t sit down and say, “I’m writing a historic comedy, or I’m going to write a gay movie, etc.” We sat down and said, “Let’s make the funniest movie we can make.”

But also, and I told those guys from the beginning—and to their credit, they were always backing me up on it—I said, “It has to be authentic.” That’s what I want to give people. I want LGBTQ folks and the gay men that the movie is essentially about to see themselves refl ected in a way we have not gotten nearly enough of over the years, especially on a big screen in the movie theater. And I think it’s important and fun and exciting for straight people, who might think they know what it’s like to be gay based on a few wacky sitcom characters they’ve seen over the years, but they don’t really know.

I told Nick and Judd from the beginning, we can’t just do When Harry Met Sally and slip in two gay guys, you know? We don’t play by those rules. And the movie has to refl ect that. So that was really important to me.

Macfarlane: The rules are di erent.

Luke, in terms of your involvement in this fi lm, can you kind of speak to how you became aware of it? How do you know Billy, or was this your fi rst interaction?

Macfarlane: It was very much the old-fashioned way. My agent sent me a script and said, “This is a great part.” I was aware of Billy but had never met him before. I read the script . . . and immediately had that feeling, “Oh, oh boy, this is, this is good.” Not only because it was hilarious, but because it really spoke to something that I identifi ed with. And then I went in, I auditioned, and it felt really good. . . . We sat down in conversation before and after, and we’ve talked about this a couple times, but the Garth Brooks thing [Brooks is Aaron’s favorite musician, much to Bobby’s dismay] actually came out of a real conversation that happened during fi lming.

Luke Macfarlane as Aaron and Billy Eichner as

Bobby in Bros UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Eichner: On set! A few weeks into fi lming.

Macfarlane: On set. And Billy was like, “I’m going to put it in.” And there were other things that he just sort of threw in that didn’t ultimately make it in the movie that were just based on conversations and how he and I are di erent and how we take up two di erent sort of spectrums of the cis, white male spectrum.

Were there any favorite moments that didn’t make it into the fi lm?

Eichner: We shot 170 pages. With the extra time that, unfortunately, COVID gave us—because we got shut down about a month before we were supposed to start shooting in early 2020 and then a year and a half passed by—we just kept writing more stu and more funny stu and more jokes. So, by the time we got to shoot, we had 170 pages. To Nick’s credit, he somehow found a way to shoot it all, because the number of shoot days we got didn’t increase.

Yeah, oh my god, there were so many jokes. I think some of the set pieces that we had to cut will end up on the DVD or something like that. We had a whole Pride parade sequence, a huge Pride parade that falls apart where everyone starts fi ghting. I love that scene, but ultimately, some things were a little, in the context of the movie, too silly. It’s not a sketch comedy show, it’s a real, grounded story we’re trying to tell, one with a lot of comedy and a lot of laughs, but sometimes even when things were funny on paper, it just felt like a di erent tone. They couldn’t fi t in the movie as much as we loved them. There’s a lot of those. And I think maybe you’ll see them in the extras.  v @acmkhatib