Jos h Thomas is beyond d istraugh t . “Ah, fuck, I lost a suitcase! Ah, fuck! I lost my suitcase at security. Ah, shit! I'm an idiot. I have to go.” And with that Thomas, the inventive creator and star of Please Like Me and Everything’s Gonna Be Okay is off the line. After a bit of schedule wrangling, the interview resumes a few days later, but not without its own set of issues, this time faulty cell service in the Hollywood hills that currently serve as the boyish 32-year-old Australian’s home in America. After twenty minutes, a connection is finally made. “I'm yours,” he laughs. Those unfamiliar with Thomas would do well to invest serious binging time into his shows, starting with Please Like Me, which opens with Thomas informing his girlfriend that they have to break up because he thinks he’s gay. The funny, deeply felt comedy, which ran for four seasons from 2013 to 2016, and
ing mechanism. He's never trying to hit the audience over the head with saying pedantically, ‘This is this way, this is this way, this is so black and white.’ He much more lives in that gray area. As we were reading lines, his notes to me were always to just be real, to be natural, to be myself.” “I think Josh has a unique, specific voice,” says Silas Howard, who directed five of the show’s ten episodes. “I love the use of humor, how it comes out of really messed up situations, and how imperfect everything is. What I love about this show is the honesty, like people say the wrong things, and then they do something totally different and counterintuitive. So you're getting to watch people fail. I think we need to have more acceptance of failure. There's a lot of great comedy that comes out of that.” Thomas, who is unabashedly gay, creates shows that attempt to fully incorporate the LGBTQ experience. Please Like Me dealt, extremely poignantly, with one character’s fears of coming out in a magnificent scene that brilliantly incorporated Sia’s
REALITY TV Josh Thomas, star of the stunning new comedy Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, has his own unique way of looking at the world.
is now available on Hulu, is a stunning mix of humor and drama, as it follows a group of mopish, self-involved twentysomethings as they adjust to the daily rigors of adult life. The romances on the show — both gay and straight — are messy and real. More to the point, Thomas’ character — also named Josh — must cope with a mother who is manic-depressive and prone to bouts of suicide. It’s startling material for a comedy, and comes mostly from Thomas’ own life. Only the cataclysmic fourth season is not rooted in reality. “The last season is not autobiographical at all,” he says, his strong Australian accent bright and buoyant. “It’s a bit weird when you start making up big life events for a character that's based on you.” After the series ended, Thomas had second thoughts and decided to do a fifth season, but the host network, Pivot, shuttered. So he moved on to developing a new project, this time for the Disney-owned Freeform network, formerly ABC Family. The resulting show, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, finds Thomas as Nicholas, half-brother to two American teenage girls, Matilda (the astounding Kayla Cromer), who is on the autism spectrum, and Genevieve (Maeve Press, equally astounding). In the premiere, their shared father reveals he’s dying of cancer and appoints Nicholas, an etymologist, as the girls’ guardian. As the episodes progress, challenges present themselves that are both minor (a broken finger) and major (Genevieve and her friends raid the medicine cabinet). Meanwhile, Nicholas attempts to navigate a relationship with the winsome and winning Alex, a dental student played with an abundance of warmth by Adam Faison. “Josh has an amazing way of toeing the line between the comedic and the tragic,” says Faison. “He uses laughter as a cop24
JANUARY 30, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM
“Chandelier.” It is television at its most poignant, sweet, and honest. Everything’s Gonna Be Okay is no less LGBTQ — but its tone is more self-assured, as Nicholas isn’t learning how to navigate new waters but rather stay afloat in familiar ones as he attempts to connect with someone special and lasting. “Josh was very good about being like, ‘You know what? This is life, and this is our truth’ to the network,” says Faison, who is gay. “He was like, ‘You know what? I'm going to speak to the audience that I want to speak to, and cater to them, and if other people show up and want to learn something about us, too, that's amazing. But if they choose not to, that's totally their prerogative.’ “First and foremost, what he does is not make it so much like he's trying to be, ‘We are queer, and it dictates every single thing about us.’ It's kind of just like, ‘We are humans that just so happen to be queer, and this is what we do.... It's something that I wish that I would've had growing up as a queer kid, as a role model.” For his part, Thomas is happy with the latitude Freeform has provided him. “Freeform is progressive,” he says. “This show is progressive. I think probably the most controversial thing — and fair enough — is that I wanted to use the word faggot. I would say probably that the word faggot hadn't been used on any show that falls under the Disney umbrella. It was probably the only time that they really freaked out. They said, ‘We'll run it by GLAAD,’ and I laughed. I thought, ‘Why are GLAAD better authorities on being gay than I am?’ GLAAD said that it was fine. Maybe they think if you're a gay showrunner and you're a gay actor, you're allowed to use it. It’s our word.”
RYAN PFLUGER
Interview by Randy Shulman
