Screenwriter Billy Eichner knew from the beginning that he wanted to make a film about modern, urban gay male life that felt adult, authentic and relatable. “I wanted a movie that showed in a very funny, but realistic, way what happens when two adult gay men who both pride themselves on not needing a relationship fall in love for the first time. Men in general, and especially gay men, pride themselves on being strong and self-reliant. And in terms of the LGBTQ+ world, we’ve all had to be really strong on the outside. We want to be tough, and we don’t want to need anyone else. So, what happens when two men like that fall for each other?”
The romantic comedy is almost as old as movies themselves and includes everything from vintage classics such as 1934’s It Happened One Night and 1940’s His Girl Friday to modern ones such as When Harry Met Sally, Annie Hall and Moonstruck. But in almost a century of movies, and for all those hundreds of cinematic stories, no major film studio had ever released a romantic comedy about two gay men.
Billy Eichner didn’t think they ever would, even when director Nicholas Stoller reached out to him in the fall of 2017 to talk to Eichner about co-writing and starring in one. “I never believed for a second that a major studio would do it,” Billy Eichner says. “I told Nick that, and he kept saying, ‘I think they will.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, I have been at this a long time, and they’re not going to do it.’ I was bringing 20 years of being told that I was ‘too gay’ to that conversation. But Nick was right.”
Stoller had become one of the most successful comedy directors of his generation, with a string of hits that included the Neighbors films and Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the smash Netflix series Friends from College, which is where he first met Eichner. “Billy is one of the few people I know in the industry who is totally self-made,” Stoller says. “Everyone has mentors. His mentor was YouTube. He put his stuff on Funny or Die, and it became popular. He didn’t have someone. He really made it himself and to make it yourself when the entire industry for a long time was saying you’re not going to make it because of your
origin sexual orientation takes a lot of inner strength. So, I knew Billy was funny, but there was a scene in the first season of Friends From College, a very emotional scene, and he just was so good as an actor. And then the first episode we played in a movie theater, and every time he was on screen, he destroyed. And I was like, ‘Oh, he’s a movie star.’ I’d wanted to work on a romantic comedy about two gay men, but I can’t write it by myself. I’m not gay so it wouldn’t be honest. I emailed him and I was like, ‘Would you want to do this?’”
Eichner said yes, and the two launched into a collaboration that proved eye-opening for both of them. “I had never written a movie before and Nick didn’t really know much about gay culture, other than what the media tells us,” Eichner says. “So, I educated him on gay culture and he educated me on how to structure a screenplay for a major studio. The partnership was a funny, unique, surprising marriage of sorts, among cowriters. We were very much partners on everything. And that began what became a five-year process.”
BROS streams exclusively on SHOWMAX
From Page to Screen
Judd Apatow was the ideal producer for what would become Bros. Over his storied career, Apatow has elevated a series of promising young comedy talents to their first major big-screen performance, including Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Kristen Wiig, Amy Schumer, Kumail Nanjiani and Pete Davidson. Bros had the potential to do the same for Eichner. “I’m a giant fan of Billy Eichner,” Apatow says. “Nick Stoller and I worked together on The Five-Year Engagement, Undeclared and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. We wrote Fun With Dick and Jane, so we like working together. We felt like this was the kind of movie that never gets made: a gay romcom by a major studio with a big budget. It seemed ridiculous that there hadn’t already been hundreds of tthem. So, we were all very excited to
try to make that happen.”
While everyone involved knew the film would be a watershed for LGBTQ+ representation, the paramount goal was to make the most hilarious, and heartfelt, comedy possible. “Generally, in the work of creativity, I just try to think of who’s talented, who’s funny, who has stories to tell,” Apatow says. “Sometimes if you think about the political aspect of creating projects, you can get into a place where you lose track of the imagination and the fun of it. But the truth is our business has neglected to represent so many different
types of people. I don’t like to start thinking that Bros will solve that; I just think I’d love to see this kind of movie because it doesn’t exist. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to put together something like this, which is so meaningful to so many people. But the most important thing is that it’s funny.”
The genesis of the film’s narrative came from a sketch Eichner had done on his series Billy on the Street years earlier called “The Bro Lightning Round” with Jason Sudeikis.
“It was one of the only times on Billy on the Street when I took on another persona,” Eichner says. “I turned myself into a bro and I wore khakis and a sports jersey and a backwards baseball cap. And I was going up to people and doing this bro voice and totally changed my demeanor. It went sort of viral, and people wrote all these think-pieces about how it was a commentary on masculinity. In real life, a good friend of mine — a gay friend of mine — saw me in the sketch and he was like, ‘You know, you’re really hot in that sketch.’ This is someone who’s been a good friend of mine for 20 years and has never, ever
hinted at any sort of attraction to me. And he literally said — without any irony or sarcasm — ‘You should dress like that, because you’re really hot in that mode.’ And I was like, ‘Do you know what you’re saying right now? So, you think I should completely alter my voice, body and everything about me in order to seem hot?’ I think he thought he was complimenting me. And I thought, there’s something to this, because it’s funny, and it’s also kind of messed up. And that inspired the whole movie.”
Among the many gay-culture aspects that the film affectionately satirizes—absurd workout crazes, Grindr hookups, thruples, intra-queer politics—Bros shines its brightest, most unflinching light on those elements of gay male cultural that elevate, emulate and eroticize stereotypical masculinity.
“This movie is all about masculinity and the inability for men — particularly in the gay community — to be vulnerable and to be comfortable in their own skin,” Stoller says. “I think these are issues that any man has dealt with in some way, but it’s specific to the gay community. And it is specifically Billy’s story.”
In fact, the first scene Eichner thought of for the film is one in which his character, Bobby, has just been dumped and decides to get in peak shape. “Bobby’s feeling very insecure about how he looks and his body and masculinity,” Eichner says. “So, he’s at the gym working out, and he sees a guy across the gym that he thinks is hot, and they’re making eyes at each other and Bobby walks over to the guy to flirt with him. But as he does, he makes a last-minute decision to change the way he’s walking. He turns his baseball cap around to seem more like a bro and he makes his voice much deeper than it normally is. And he changes his personality in order to seem more attractive.”
This is an ongoing issue among gay men who came of age in the ’90s and 2000s,Eichner says. “My friends and I, we didn’t struggle with being gay,” Eichner says. “I’m sure some people did. I never did. But where the struggle came was: ‘Well, I’m gay, and that’s cool. But I still want to be a man.’ The struggle was with masculine versus feminine or masculine versus flamboyant. Like, ‘I’m gay, but I still want to be a bro.’ I don’t feel this way anymore. But I certainly did. And it’s something that was ingrained in gay men in my
generation.”
It’s so pervasive, in fact, that Eichner himself doesn’t always realize when he’s slipping into bro-mode, even now. “All my agents are straight men, and my lawyers are straight men, and my manager is a straight man, and they’re all very lovely and wonderful,”
Eichner says “I had an assistant for a really long time who was a co-producer on Bros and she said to me, ‘Whenever they call you, your voice drops two octaves.’ And I didn’t even realize it. It’s very indicative of all the code switching that we’ve done over the years. It’s just a part of our lives that we have to constantly play that game of, ‘How should I behave in front of this straight person in order to not alienate them?’”
Ultimately, though, the film is about the herculean challenges of finding someone who doesn’t drive you crazy—and then finding the courage to let yourself love them.
“It’s the story of two men who fall for each other, but who, at the same time, for different reasons, are both intimidated by each other and a little scared of each other,” Eichner says.
The story is specific and authentic to gay men, but the emotions are universal. “We didn’t set out to make a niche movie that’s only for a specific community,” producer Josh Church says. “We want the movie to speak to the LGBTQ+ community, but this movie will have impact because it’s going to reach an audience of people who are just coming to see a romcom, and they’re going to see stories that they haven’t seen before. They’re going to see performers they’ve never seen before. They’re going to hear jokes they’ve never heard before. And hopefully, everybody comes away from it realizing that stories are stories, and
we should be looking for these stories through every part of society, from every person, from every group.”
Stoller and Apatow had an excellent built-in test audience for how the film would play to people outside the LGBTQ+ community: themselves.
“Everybody relates to wanting to be happy, wanting to feel connected, to be in love, to feel supported, to feel understood, and respected,” Apatow says. “So there really is nothing about a movie like this that isn’t
fully relatable and universal. I mean, everyone has this type of experience.” And Stoller was excited to be inviting straight audiences into the gay-male experience. “My goal was to make the most hysterical episode of Frontline of all time,” Stoller says. “So, you’re laughing and then you’re like, ‘That was interesting. I want to talk about that later with my spouse or friend.’ But right now I’m laughing and I don’t even know that I’m absorbing information.”
The Characters
For almost the entirety of Hollywood history, it was considered career suicide for a straight actor, particularly a straight male actor, to play a gay role. But after Tom Hanks won the Oscar for 1993’s Philadelphia, attitudes began to shift and, over the years, playing gay roles has become a fast track to awards recognition. Since 1993, more than 15 heterosexual men have been nominated for or have won Academy Awards for playing gay characters. It’s so common that it was parodied by Robert Downey Jr.’s movie-star character in Tropic Thunder, a role that Downey himself was nominated for. Notably,
however, no gay man, who was openly gay at the time, has ever won the Oscar for Best Actor. Still.
“For decades, Hollywood allowed straight actors to play the best-written, juiciest,
most multi-dimensional, high-profile LGBTQ+ roles, and they end up winning awards,” Billy
Eichner says. “And they use these roles to show people their range, and how ‘brave’ they
are and how serious they are as actors, which is all well and good. But it never works in the
opposite direction.”
So, when Nicholas Stoller, Eichner, and producers Judd Apatow and Josh Church began casting Bros, this idea was forefront in their minds. “The first decision made about casting was that my love interest would be played by another openly gay actor,” Eichner says. “Everyone felt very strongly about that. The studio felt strongly about that, to their credit. And then once we made that decision, I turned to Nick and said, ‘Everyone in the cast should be openly LGBTQ+.’ The movie itself was becoming, to a certain degree, about allowing queer people to tell our own stories, to control our own stories. It felt like we needed to use this as an opportunity to populate the movie with openly LGBTQ+ actors and actresses and trans people and non-binary people who simply have not had these opportunities before based solely on who they were in their personal lives, which makes no sense.
MacFarlane was thrilled to be part of an entirely LGBTQ+ cast. “I think every cast has a certain cohesiveness, but we all have a similar experience in the world,” MacFarlane says. “And I think that binds us together. If I had been able to see someone like myself on camera growing up, it would have changed the course of my life and the course of my happiness. That’s why this movie is important. It’s for the generation coming up, for them to just see people and say, ‘That’s also okay.’”