Russell Tovey: Gay Male Backlash to ‘Looking’ ‘Broke Me, Honestly’
HBO’s short-lived “Looking” never really stood a chance.
Creator Michael Lannan’s series about the ins and outs of three gay best friends in San Francisco ran for two seasons in 2014 and 2015, followed by a 2016 straight-to-HBO movie in place of a third season. Starring Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez, Russell Tovey, and a pre-“White Lotus” Murray Bartlett, “Looking” arrived on the cusp of when studios started thinking seriously with their dollars in terms of telling queer stories for the mainstream. And those hoping “Looking” would be HBO’s gay answer to “Sex and the City” might have been disappointed with what they received instead: an indie film-style dramedy that played to the often drifting rhythms of its characters’ lives, seeking love and sex in a Bay Area being swallowed by the tech boom.
Tovey, an out British actor who’s since made a name on stage (“Angels in America”) and screen (“American Horror Story: NYC”) for playing roles both queer and straight but mostly the former, is now airing out his feelings about the gay male response to the series at the time. In “Looking,” he played Kevin Matheson, the boss of Groff’s Patrick, with whom he has a tormented romance while running a video-game startup. Season 2 ended with their relationship disintegrating, and “Looking: The Movie” found the pair too at odds to pick up the pieces again.
“The critical narrative at the beginning was that nothing much happened in it,” Tovey told The Independent while discussing his upcoming live performance of Derek Jarman’s autobiographical AIDS eulogy “Blue.” “That it was too boring. But it was just real life!”
The critical response to “Looking” was largely mixed throughout its run, with even the San Francisco Chronicle calling the second season “a bit boring” and “predictable.” (A handful of gay friends I polled for this story didn’t have shiny things to say.)
But Tovey was most stung by reactions from his own gay male community. He recalled shooting Season 2 scenes outside a San Francisco coffee shop, where he was approached by gay men passing by the set. “They’d say, ‘You’re in ‘Looking!’… but I’ve not watched it, I’ve heard it’s boring.’ They hadn’t even seen it! And it’s about you, in your city, filming outside your coffee shop, and you’re not even intrigued to watch it? It really, really frustrated me. It broke me, honestly,” he said.
Tovey remains crushed over the series’ early cancelation. No plans for a Season 3 reboot ever materialized. Throughout its run, “Looking” was shunned by the Television Academy for Primetime Emmys despite plenty of accomplished directors in the roster, including Andrew Haigh, Joe Swanberg, Ryan Fleck, Jamie Babbit, and Craig Johnson. At its peak, “Looking” netted a few hundred thousand viewers a week — around 519,000 for a mid-Season 1 episode — hardly enough to motivate HBO to keep greenlighting it.
However, Tovey said, “If that show came out now, it’d have a completely different response.” He pointed the shows like Netflix’s queer smash YA series “Heartstopper” as signs of changing times.
“Look at ‘Heartstopper’ or ‘Glee.’ If we had them shows when I was growing up, I would have felt a bit better about myself,” Tovey said. “I’m so proud of the way the world is now. For young kids to be able to say, ‘Cool, I’ll watch “Glee” tonight and then go to a gay bar’ – that is an incredible gift that’s been handed down. But we must pay respect and remember where that gift came from.”