Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Looking returns to HBO this Saturday one last time, having received the rarest of gifts: the chance to wrap things up on its own terms after early cancellation. Through its first two seasons, Looking followed a trio of gay men through their lives in San Francisco: Patrick (Jonathan Groff) the naive lamb whose search for a meaningful partnership could make him so frustrating; Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), the wannabe artist whose more-radical-than-thou posturing blew up in his face; and Dom (Murray Bartlett), whose dreams of peri peri chicken were finally realized at the end of season 2. On Saturday night, HBO will be airing a special Looking movie, one which allows creator Michael Lannan and director Andrew Haigh to provide viewers some much needed closure on the series.
Decider sat down with Groff, Alvarez, and Bartlett in advance of Looking: The Movie‘s premiere to discuss how the series is wrapping up, what it means to have gay stories on TV, and dealing with gay critiques of the show.
When asked how it felt to return to the show only to wrap it up for good, Groff expressed a contentment. “With the movie,” he said, “it was like, there’s no question, this is the end. So there was a level of confidence that you had just going like, ‘This is it, we’ve got nothing to lose.’ Andrew and Michael could do what they wanted to do, they wrote this movie, they didn’t really have to answer to anyone. It was a beautiful, bittersweet goodbye. So there was a different energy.”
The Looking movie picks up some time after the end of season 2. Patrick has left San Francisco, dropping his hard-won relationship with Kevin (Russell Tovey) and moving to Denver, where’s been able to design video games away from his old romantic tensions. The movie sees him returning to San Francisco for a wedding, and the theme of these impending nuptials ripples through the entire film. It brings up a particular bit of discord within the gay community: whether the fact that we can get married now means we necessarily should get married. Is normativity the goal or is the queerness of the gay community something that should be fiercely preserved?
“One of the things I’ve always loved about the show,” said Bartlett, “is that is throws up all those questions, and there’s characters that represent all those different viewpoints, but it doesn’t try to answer those questions, necessarily. Or the answer is in just looking at the questions and seeing what all the viewpoints are.”
Groff revisited that notion a bit later in the interview. “I think the point of it is that there is no one way. You can change, you can label yourself as one thing and then decide to change it to something else. I think the journey of all the characters is they’ve all become different people.” Groff referenced a new character, Jimmy (Michael Rosen), a 22-year old who Patrick meets at a club, as well as Lynn, Scott Bakula’s character from seasons 1-2 (who does not appear in the film), and pointed out the wide spectrum of gay characters and experiences that the show has presented. “From […] Jimmy, who came out when he was sixteen, to Lynn, whose partner died of AIDS, in this moment in the gay community, it’s so varied.”
One of the chief pleasures of having Looking back again is in watching the obvious closeness of the trio of main characters. The chaotic, lived-in quality of scenes at gay bars or restaurants as the guys catch up gives the movie an air of eavesdropping on a group at the next table. This is in keeping with Haigh’s aesthetic in movies’s he’s directed like Weekend and 45 Years. Alvarez said the vibe wasn’t something they had to consciously construct. “We were very fortunate that we all like each other. We had a whole summer between shooting the pilot and the first season where we all hung out and saw shows together and went to the movies together and went dancing together and all that stuff, so by the time we were shooting the series, there was a kind of rapport and a trust that we had with each other where none of us was going to try to outshine each other. So by the time we were doing the movie, that’s three years down the line, so we really had a good give and take.”
Capitalizing on two seasons’ worth of shared chemistry feels like a priority in the film. The TV series had established a backstory from day one that Patrick and Dom’s friendship grew out of an unsuccessful hook-up. It was never a thing, just a piece of their past. That relationship gets a bit more of a spotlight in the movie, in a moment which blurs the lines between friendship and sex.
“I love that scene,” Bartlett said. “They’re so intimate with each other, and it shows the possibility of intimacy between men. It goes right up to that point where they could be lovers or not. I think that is something that shouldn’t be specifically between gay men, but it is something that is very … there are a lot of friendships between gay men that start in that way, they hook up or whatever and then they become friends, so it is very specific. But it kind of speaks to how wonderful it is to have this great intimacy between men. And we’re so confined by the boundaries of what relationships should be, and not that boundaries aren’t important at times, but it really shows the depth of their intimacy, that they can go to that point and then have the choice to take it further or not. But it’s at that level. That’s what their relationship is. It’s such a beautiful scene.”
At one point in the film, an argument between two characters begins to take on a bit of a meta air. “I love when gays argue with gays about being gay,” cracks Lauren Weedman’s Doris. I asked the guys about the criticism that the show received, in particular from gay critics, who knocked it for being everything from boring to not sexually explicit enough to not truly representative of the gay community at large.
“The thing that was so surprising to us about the show was the super intense reaction,” said Groff. “We spent the first season just making this show and trying to make it feel as real and true and honest and tell the stories of these characters. And then watching the explosion of opinion. Which was was really interesting and sort of made me reflect on gay identity for myself, like, where do I fit in, who am I?”
Groff went on: “To have one show where there’s gay people at the center — which is so sad, that there’s only one show. I’m glad we at least got to do it, where we’re putting gay people at the center of the show. It’s impossible to take all of those people — and we did our best, and we got a lot in there — but it makes sense that people get upset, and frustrated conversations started, because there isn’t enough representation.”
“And also it’s healthy,” Bartlett picked up. “Those conversations are really healthy. For all the vehemence that there might have been at the beginning, it is really important to have something that makes you think, ‘Well who are we? And who am I? And what do we want? And how do we want to be represented?’ It’s important.”
“The thing that’s unhealthy is wanting the show to be a version of a different show,” said Alvarez. “That’s the thing that was tough. We were tonally trying to create something new. And people, on a lot of days in TV and film, the conversation is about, ‘Well how is this new thing like the old things?’ And so we’re getting compared to Girls in a way where it’s like, we had nothing to do with Girls. It just so happened that it’s three people in a city. The same way that it’s four girls in a city. But that’s the only similarity. And so we suffer by comparison because we don’t have the same tone, but that is deliberate.”
Reflecting on where the series ended up, Groff took an optimistic view. “It did feel by the way that people have been embracing the movie and the way that people were embracing the second season, it really did feel like Looking found its audience, and it found the people that loved it for what it was. And that’s such a nice feeling. At the end of the day, with the movie, and people coming up to me on the street saying, ‘I’m excited for the movie,’ it really did, in a good way, find that group that really felt passionate about it.”
Looking: The Movie will premiere on HBO Go and HBO Now on Saturday, July 23.
