A lot of the movie is about the things we do to cover up our fear of being vulnerable. For Apatow, who’s created films loosely inspired by the real-life stories of stars ranging from Amy Schumer to Pete Davidson, it was all about following what he calls “our usual process, which is going into psychoanalysis for a few years to try to figure out what the story should be. As with those two earlier films, comedy giant Judd Apatow was on board as a producer. Stoller started his career building films around talented rising stars - Jason Segel in Sarah Marshall, Jonah Hill and Russell Brand in Get Him to the Gree k - and saw Bros as a chance to do so again. As a kid, he says, “I went to see Steve Martin and Tom Hanks movies and I thought, ‘Oh, I could do something like that.’ It was only when I was in my mid-twenties when I started to think, ‘I guess I’ll be lucky if I can just play the neighbor on a sitcom.’ Because that’s what Hollywood was telling me.” But as a 43-year-old openly gay man, he had nearly given up on anyone in Hollywood agreeing with him. He did Angels in Americ a and Chekhov plays onstage when he studied acting at Northwestern, and always saw himself as a leading man. He’s a movie star.”īros proves Stoller right, and validates Eichner’s original conception of his potential. “I thought he’d be good,” Stoller says, “but he was really good. Over the course of the latter project, Stoller realized that Eichner - who also starred in Hulu’s Difficult People and played a very convincing Matt Drudge on Impeachment: American Crime Story, among other parts - had unexplored potential.
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Eichner, best known for hilariously haranguing celebrities and random passersby in his belligerent Billy on the Street persona, had a small role in Stoller’s Neighbors 2, and a bigger one as an uptight doctor in Stoller’s Netflix series Friends From College. Pretty soon, though, he realized he knew a guy. They really made me fall in love with movies. “I look around at movies in general - about straight people, about gay people - especially comedies, and say, ‘Where are the adults?’ I grew up with those great James L. In all, Bros is an instant classic, auguring the long-awaited return of big, theatrical comedies made for and about grown-ups. ) When Bobby meets Aaron (Luke MacFarlane), a handsome, jock-ish lawyer with his own commitment issues, he’s shocked to find himself falling in love for the first time… and the stuff of rom-coms ensues. (Eichner compares Bobby to Holly Hunter’s Type A whirlwind in Broadcast News. The result is a new twist on the romantic comedy, with Eichner working in the Billy Crystal/Woody Allen (sorry!) vein as Bobby Leiber, a successful but neurotic and emotionally unavailable New York media figure who’s also heading up an in-the-works LGBTQ history museum.
Now times that by two.’ That’s going to be a very complicated situation, and we’ve really never seen it explored.” We are men! I always say to my straight male friends, ‘Think about all the weird, fucked-up male shit you have in your brain about sex and monogamy and being vulnerable.
I think straight people think we’re basically women. But, as I often tell my straight friends, we’re still men. “And two men together is a very unique, specific romantic situation. “We have our own rules about what’s ethical or not ethical, in terms of dating and commitment and monogamy,” Eichner adds. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules' And at the end of the day, they’re the same - and different.” “And Billy came into this saying, ‘No! It’s super different.’ I kind of went to a class taught by him where he explains, in great detail, all the differences. “I did come into this being like, ‘Well, all relationships, whether straight or gay or whatever, are, on some fundamental level, the same,’” says Stoller. Stoller, who directed Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors, had to shake off some universalist impulses to co-write and direct Bros, which is getting a big push from Universal Studios. “But what I told him right off the bat is, ‘If we’re going to do this, you have to understand that this is not as simple as doing When Harry Met Sally and swapping in two men.'” “I knew it was such a huge opportunity,” says Eichner, the star and co-writer of Bros, due out Sept. Billy Eichner had one lesson he wanted to impart to Nick Stoller as they attempted to write what would become the first gay romantic comedy release by a major studio: Love is, in fact, not love.