HBO's Looking has had a rough go of it. Created by Michael Lannan and Weekend director Andrew Haigh, it focused on three gay men in San Francisco and their extended social and romantic circles, and when it premiered, it was treated as if it had to be a high-profile representative of the entire gay experience. (Some people thought it wasn't queer enough; some people thought it was boring.) Looking ran for two seasons—just 18 episodes—then got unceremoniously canceled.
What's hot in the rap game right now? History, of course—and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jonathan Groff, and Daveed Diggs told GQ how their lives have changed now that they're in the year's biggest Broadway show.
But a movie concluding the series in lieu of a third season aired tonight on HBO, without much fanfare. It focuses on the changed circumstances of Patrick Murray, played by Jonathan Groff, as he returns to San Francisco after a few months away. In the movie, the main characters find themselves settling down, staking a claim to the sort of comfortable, steady, monogamous happiness–marriage–that would be easy to dismiss as boring.
In addition to his work on Looking, Groff played King George in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton, and is currently filming David Fincher's upcoming Netflix series Mindhunter. He took a break from all that work, however, to talk about Looking, the importance of gay clubs, and his turn as grand marshal of New York's gay pride parade. (Spoilers for Looking abound below.)
Let's start at the end. At what point in working on the movie did it become obvious that Patrick and Richie was going to be the endgame for the series?
Andrew [Haigh] and Michael [Lannan] always kind of hinted that Patrick and Richie would end up together. They just kind of always had that feeling. Also when we shot that episode in the first season where Patrick and Richie go on that long extended date, there was this sense of chemistry and connection and groundedness. But I also think Patrick had a lot of growing up to do before he was able to commit to someone as solid and as real as Richie was, and I think the movie expresses that as well.
Besides being capable of actually being in this relationship, how else do you think Patrick has changed over the course of the series?
He's changed a lot! The very first scene of the very first episode was Patrick going into the woods to get an anonymous handjob and kind of freaking out and running away. I always loved that that was how you met Patrick, because it showed someone who was pretty inexperienced, but also ready to step out of their comfort zone and try something new. Over the course of the first two seasons, and even the movie, we see him becoming a man, becoming more solid in who he is.
More than anything–and one of the things I can relate to the most in Patrick–is being okay with the fact that you don't have all the answers, and having the confidence to move forward asking questions without feeling like you have to answer them right away. That's one of the things I love about the movie, what Frankie's character Agustin says, right before he gets married: "We love each other, and we'll try to make it work, and if it doesn't work out, then at least we can say we tried." Patrick carries that into the big final scene with Richie, and I think that's a great sort of message in the movie: moving forward with the best of hopes and intentions, but also knowing that sometimes things don't work out.
So much of the movie seems like the characters acknowledging what it means to be adults, and accepting that that can be a bit more boring than you expected–like Agustin coming to terms with his own marriage. That feels like a response to some of the early criticism of the show.
I think it was more of just a natural progression of the story than it was a conscious response to the criticism of the show. Because the criticism was kind of all different types of things. Some people thought it was too sexual, some people thought it wasn't sexual enough, some people thought the characters were immature, some people thought the characters didn't do anything. So I think the evolution and growth of the characters came more from a place of the evolution of the story, more than the criticism of the show. And Andrew and Michael did a good job of keeping their heads down and staying committed to the stories they wanted to tell, despite anything that was coming to them from the outside.
Let's talk about that scene with Dom. It went on a little too long for me to be comfortable, and I started to get worried: "Oh God, is this going to happen?" What was that like, reading this scene, then playing at playing this imaginary relationship?
That was one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Murray and I are super close in real life, and we brought a lot of ourselves to that moment. I think that Andrew and Michael wrote that scene knowing our relationship off-camera. One of the things I love about it too is that it explores this particular gay male intimacy that isn't sexual—where you're kind of like, "Should it be?" And I think that straight people have that too, where you're really good friends with a person you don't find unattractive, but you've never crossed that line, or you crossed that line a long time ago and you sort of think, "We're such good friends, isn't that what makes a good relationship? Why shouldn't we try this?" I think it's really complicated, and it's really interesting.
A lot of times too, I find being gay and having straight friends is like, "Oh, I have the perfect person to set you up with!" and it's, like, their other gay friend. There's no common interest, and there's no other reason they would want to set us up, other than the fact that we're both gay. They're like, "Well, you're gay! And he's gay! So you guys should date! Because you're both gay!" That's not quite how that works. I think that scene speaks to that as well—like, "We're such good friends, why can't this work? Can this work?"
Is there material in Patrick's life that you wish you would've been able to cover, if the show hadn't been canceled?
Now that we know Patrick and Richie end up together, I would have loved to just see the two of them throughout the course of their relationship–not having to do with "will we or won't we be together." I just want to see their relationship play out, kind of in real time, just to see what that looks like and what that feels like. Dom just got really successful with his chicken window, and I would have loved to see what a relationship looked like for him, now that he's sort of settled in his life.
Do you have thoughts about how you want people to see the show as time goes on and we get a hopefully rich body of work about gay people?
That's what was so heartbreaking about the show getting canceled. It felt like we had just gotten some distance from that initial swirl of expectation from when the show came out. It's not the gay Sex and the City or the gay Girls or the only gay show on TV, so it has to be all these things. By the end of the second season, though, the dust was settling, and we were kind of getting into our creative groove, and we were starting to find our particular audience that was invested in the show for what it was.
The show, ultimately, is about male intimacy–in relationships and in friendships. I think it's rare on TV that you see men relating to each other, romantically or not, in an open-hearted, vulnerable way.
Are there any examples on other existing shows of that kind of intimacy?
I'm late to the party, I literally just started watching Orange Is the New Black, but it's like that, only with with male intimacy.
One of my favorite things about the show and the movie is the way these gorgeous extended party scenes are shot–there are a couple of club scenes in the movie. Have you changed the way you relate to those spaces after Orlando? It made it much harder to watch the movie.
Oh my God, I know. We screened the movie at the Castro, the last day of Pride, in San Francisco, the week after Orlando. And those scenes where everyone's just partying–we were like, whoa. They feel more weighted, and important, and ecstatic, considering everything. There's sort of a heart-swell and loving energy that comes out of those scenes, I think.
Andrew would always talk about finding himself in clubs when he was younger. He would go out, and he would go dancing. That's the way he expressed himself, that's how he found himself. That's how he met his now-husband Michael Lannon, the creator–the first guy he ever kissed was on the dance floor at The Stud, where we shot a lot of our dance scenes in San Francisco. There's just a lot of good personal memories for our creators of going crazy and dancing, and I think they felt really committed to getting those into the show. The episode where I'm wearing that leather vest during the Folsom Street Fair, we're literally dancing in the spot that Michael had his first kiss ever with a man.
And they were always the most fun scenes to shoot. Usually on a film set there's no music, because they can't get the sound of people talking, and so you're talking really loud even though there's no music, which is really awkward. But they gave us these little earwigs so we could hear the music and dance and stuff.
All of the music in the scenes? Everyone's yelling over The Pointer Sisters?
Yes, exactly.
You talked a bit about experiences other people brought to those scenes. Have you had any similar experiences?
We would go dancing a lot while we were filming. There are stories I'm debating whether or not I should reveal, but we would party with each other in San Francisco.
But to be honest, when I moved to New York, I was still in the closet. When I was doing Spring Awakening the first couple of years I was living in New York, I was gay, and I was living with my "roommate," who was my boyfriend, but was my roommate to everyone else. So my gay self-expression happened within the four walls of my apartment, and I was never brave enough to step out and dance with a group of people at a club and just be myself. I was scared that if I went to a club, then everybody would know that I was gay. I've since gotten over that, but in those early years I never got that, which sounds so depressing. But I guess I'm living it now vicariously through my character on Looking.
Did you have an early experience after you came out that served a similar purpose, even if it wasn't at a club?
Yeah! I was grand marshal of the New York City gay pride parade two years ago.
That doesn't sound public at all.
I know, right? Coming out for me was slightly painful. It was a relief, but it was also painful. I remember telling my mom, Mom, I'm gay, but I'm not going to march in a parade or anything. That's what I was telling my parents and all my friends and everything. I'm gay, but I'm not going to be on a float or something. Cut to five years later and I was the grand marshal of the gay pride parade.
Truth be told, when they asked me to do it, I hesitated before I said yes. I was like, "Uh, sure, okay." I was kind of nervous to do it, right up until the morning of. Honestly, it was one of the most incredible days I've ever had. I'd never been to a pride event before, I'd never publicly danced in a club even, or done anything in a public way. That day was transformational. I used to keep a journal years ago, and I didn't have a journal so I came home after the parade and typed on a computer about what I was feeling, because there was something so revelatory about being out and being and proud of who you are and being in a parade and being surrounded by other people who are proud of who they are. It was an epic, sort of life-changing day.
When we premiered the movie at the Castro, we got to sort of be on the tail end of gay pride there. I wore my rainbow T-shirt, and—we were in the Castro on Pride—and with everything that had just happened in Orlando, it felt a hundred times more important to be out and fearless and expressive.
That's great. I really loved this show, and I loved the movie.
Yeah, the movie is a good end. I was really sad when the show was canceled, but having seen the movie, I'm glad we got to give it a proper goodbye.
The movie felt more ambiguous to me than it did to you–Patrick and Richie are together, but how are they going to make it? Is he really going to move to Texas?
We'll find out in the Christmas special.
