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jgroffdaily · 3 months

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For two seasons and a TV movie, creator Michael Lannan and director Andrew Haigh (who was just coming off his breakthrough film Weekend and was years away from the award-winning 45 Years and All of Us Strangers) led the show’s cast and crew in crafting a new kind of gay TV show—raw, relaxed, character-driven and intimate. It didn’t fully work—in the end, Looking was cancelled due to low ratings—but a decade away from the show’s premiere, it’s clear that the show’s legacy lives on.

Onscreen, the cast of Looking—including stars-to-be like Jonathan Groff and Murray Bartlett—played characters who were working to find themselves while creating a chosen family with each other. Offscreen, the actors were doing the same thing, reckoning with their own identities and finding family in each other.

For the lead role of Patrick, the production looked at Jonathan Groff, the Tony-nominated Broadway star of Spring Awakening, who’d recently made the jump to TV with a splashy role on Ryan Murphy’s hit musical series Glee.

Haigh: I actually quite liked Glee. I thought it was a good show, but I wasn't sure he was going to be right. Then he came in, and I'm like, “Yeah, you're great for this.”

Sarah Condon (executive producer): Jonathan just had all these qualities of vulnerability and also an amazing ability, which to me is very similar in some ways to Sarah Jessica Parker, of doing the comedy and drama together—not a lot of actors actually, can do both so well and flip back and forth between. He is one of those people.

Jonathan Groff (Patrick): I came out of the closet later—I came out publicly at 23, came out to my parents that same year too. I was out but I was, in a big way, not fully accepting myself. I came out of the closet because it felt more painful to be in than out at that point, but I didn't really feel myself own who I was until I had had the experience of Looking.

I remember auditioning for the show, and feeling heat on my skin during the audition. It was the scene with Patrick and Richie on the train, doing this flirtatious scene, and I remember my skin feeling hot, and it feeling scary and exciting at the same time. I felt raw and exposed in a way that I had never felt before. So there was a real vulnerability in that, that made me feel nervous and excited.

Carmen Cuba (casting director): Jonathan Groff was out, but he hadn't played a gay character before. And more than anyone, he was the most experienced on the show, even Andrew. So he definitely must have understood more than any of us, the fact that playing the role is one thing but he was then going to be in press talking about it. It's a different thing you're agreeing to, I assume.

Groff: I remember Murray, Frankie, and I showing up to San Francisco during pre-production in March of 2013—I mean, this is 10 years ago. I remember the month. I remember Murray making us dinner, and me and Frankie going over there, and smoking weed and smelling the jasmine in the backyard of Murray's sublet that he had gotten. I remember Frankie was freaking out, because he had graduated from Juilliard and is this brilliant actor, but had never done anything on screen before, and so we were talking about that. I mean, just immediately, we knew we had to have this believable friendship in order for the show to work. And so we just started hanging out and we never stopped.

Groff quickly developed chemistry with Castillo, one of his onscreen love interests. While Castillo’s Richie was initially meant to be a minor character, the team later made the decision to make him part of the main cast.

Castillo: I remember standing on the platform in between takes with Jonathan [for our first scene together]. I remember our chemistry was developing and we were hitting it off, and I didn't want to ruin that but I also wanted to open up to him and be honest with him. I decided to tell him the story about meeting my now-wife, who at the time was my girlfriend. When she and I had met, there was an undeniable chemistry between us, like the minute we laid eyes on each other, it was just like there was this attraction. We were the only two people in the room in a room full of people. I wanted to tell Jonathan that story because I was relating it to Patrick and Richie meeting.

I was revealing to him that I was straight and he didn't bat a lash. He took it in, he listened and yeah, it was funny, because it was almost like a coming out.

Groff: I knew that he was straight, because I had asked our director or costume designer. I had gotten the intel already. It wasn't a shock. “That guy's cute. Is he gay?” [Laughs]

Condon: I mean, it sounds silly, in a way, but they were brave decisions. I remember having to have that conversation with Jonathan. “Are you up for this?” There were a lot of those kind of conversations. And Jonathan was so game, as was the whole cast.

Groff: I remember the premiere was at The Castro, and I remember feeling like I was in a fairy tale. The Castro, the audience is lit as fuck, and it's a lot of gays. They are there to celebrate, which is just such a special, unique energy at a premiere of any sort.

Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler were running HBO at that time. I remember being at that premiere and Michael was standing there, talking about, “This is the first exclusively gay show we've ever had on our network.” It felt like, “Oh my God— we're in this. We're a part of this moment in history.” It felt like more than a TV show. It felt like a big deal when he would say that.

Despite its mixed initial reception and its relative underperformance, the show made stars out of the main cast—especially Jonathan Groff.

Groff: Between the first and second season in New York, they had asked me to be the grand marshal of the Gay Pride Parade—because of the TV show, and because I'm a New Yorker and had done a lot of theater. I felt scared to do it. I said yes, because my head and my heart were telling me that I wanted to do it, but there was a huge part of me that felt incredibly fearful, incredibly insecure, and incredibly scared. I did it anyway, and that was also a ring of fire moment. Doing the Gay Pride parade, being on the front, waving at people, and being so visibly out—it was just a constant experience of being, in a great way, pushed outside of my comfort zone.

Alvarez: He was coming off of this breakup and he's meeting somebody new and he's encountering all these feelings of being out in public and what his image represents to other people. And so you're swirling with all these other things, and also you're like, just a man trying to love other men.

Groff: I remember, oh my God, talking about douching [in a scene on the show], and I had never really douched before, as myself. Frankie Alvarez came with me. What we did in the show, where we go to the Walgreens? We actually did [that] in the West Village in real life, where he walked with me to get a fucking anal douche, and also a dildo to experiment with. He was in the gay sex shop with me, doing that in real life.

Alvarez: It was a moment of vulnerability, where he wanted to go dildo shopping, but he didn't want to be alone. He could have called any number of his gay friends, but he called me. And it was a testament to our friendship that he trusted me, that even though I was straight, he understood that he had a supportive friend there through that time. I was Doris.

As the series continued, the team looked to their cast for inspiration, sometimes borrowing elements of their personal lives and using them in storylines.

Groff: I remember sitting in a diner in San Francisco with Andrew and talking him through my most recent breakup as he was writing the big, final episode of season two and the fight between Kevin and Patrick—literally, me recounting and him writing down things that I said, that we said to each other, to get that in there. Everybody was offering up their own stories the whole time. It was incredible.

Weedman: The one thing I remember was, before we did the scene where I go see my dad's dead body, the three of us were sitting in this real funeral home and we're just talking about different times in our lives we'd seen a dead body and what that's like. I had just seen my friend Christopher's body and Jonathan had been through Cory Monteith’s [death]. We were telling all these stories that were just very intense.

And then I remember after we shot the scene, that Murray came to my trailer and just walked in, and we both just cried and cried and cried. And that's pretty rare, that actors aren't just on the phone, working out their next job, figuring out how they're going to renovate their house, how they're going to spend their money—they're not jerking off their ego in some way or some kind of “building their empire.” That wasn't going on—these were just sensitive boys.

In the aftermath of Looking, the cast and crew found themselves permanently changed. The experience of making the series affected everything, from their career decisions to their everyday lives.

Groff: It brought me out of my own skin in a way that I don’t know if I would’ve otherwise. And every set I walked onto after that, every rehearsal room I walked onto after that, I didn't feel insecure about my sexuality. Looking and the experience of being on that set with all those people was so liberating, and really, truly life-changing.

Condon: We've done about a yearly reunion.

Bartlett: Raul got married last year and a bunch of us were able to go—it was sort of a Looking reunion really. It was like, “Oh my God, this is our 10-year reunion.” And it was about Raul's wedding, but it was also a bunch of old friends getting back together and a lot of us from Looking days.

Castillo: Jonathan married [my wife and I] this summer so it's like a full circle.

Groff: That girl that he was talking about [while shooting the pilot] ended up being his wife.

Ten years later, many of the actors who starred in Looking have become bonafide stars. Jonathan Groff has appeared in generational projects on stage and screen, from Hamilton to Mindhunter to Frozen. Russell Tovey has appeared in shows like Quantico, American Horror Story: NYC and the upcoming Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. O.T. Fagbenle, who had a minor role in season one as Agustin’s boyfriend, has gone on to do shows like The Handmaid’s Tale and appeared in the blockbuster Black Widow. And of course Murray Bartlett continues to be a staple of prestige TV, starring in The Last of Us and The White Lotus, which he won an Emmy for.

Groff: Even if the show didn't hit the way that we all wish it would have, it still affected people, including us, and it looks like that is the art that stays. I mean, I'm on Merrily We Roll Along right now. Forty-two years ago, it was a Broadway flop, and it's such an extraordinary show. People are finally, including me, getting to experience it for the brilliant thing that it is. And so that's encouraging, moving forward, that even though it might not be celebrated in the moment [it might have a moment later on].

Groff: I mean, ultimately, not enough people watched it, and we went off the air—that's just the story of what happened with the show. But the fact that it only lasted for two seasons and a movie, and 10 years later, we're still talking about it, there's something about the staying power of the show, and the people that continue, a decade later, to talk about the impact that it has had on them. It sort of helps heal those wounds of feeling rejected.

#jonathan groff #murray bartlett #Raul Castillo #Frankie j Alvarez #looking hbo

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