everybody’s a critic.(c) BK
собирая интервьюшки Ренди, периодически натыкаюсь на статьи про Гейла естественно, равно как и про остальных, и честно сказать прохожу мимо, потому что просто времени на все не хватает... но слишком часто стало попадаться одно и тоже словосочетание в названии, да, Gale Force (я сначала думала, что их две). Нет. выснилось, что за два с небольшим года вышло аж семь штук статей где это присутствовало в названии)) аж дважды в TV Guide...
upd 8... но это уже 2004, да и слова местами поменяны - прогресс... ну, все на этом или куда?))
upd нет, не все, еще одну, состовляя список упустила - итого 9, значит
1 Introducing Queer's Gale Force - TV Guide, December 01, 2000
2 Gale Force, By Jim Caruso for Theatremania.com, April 19, 2001
3 Gale Force Wins, Queer as Folk's bad boy, Gale Harold, talks about Sex, Success, and his summer job. From MetroSource, June/July 2001
4 Gale Force By Frank DeCaro for TV Guide, June 16, 2001
5 TV Talkback - Gale Force By Eirik Knutzen for The Toronto Star, October 20, 2001
6 Gale Force. Gale Harold is the raciest man on television in Queer as Folk, offscreen he's just a super sexy heterosexual By Karen Robinovitz for Flaunt Magazine, February 2002
7 Gale Force. By Michael Rowe for The Advocate, February 05, 2002
8 FULL FORCE GALE By P.J. Reno for IN MAGAZINE LA 20-Jun 2004
9 GALE’S FORCE: Hot as ever on QUEER AS FOLK, Gale Harold diversifies his resume. RedZone. May 8, 2003
если кому интересно - сами статьи (на английском, у одной или двух вроде, впрочем существуют переводы - 4 переведены - спасибо ele phant за уточнение... добавить что ль ссылки на переводы еще)))
читать статьи
1 Introducing Queer's Gale Force
By Michael Ausiello for TV Guide, December 01, 2000
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Much of the controversy surrounding Showtime's provocative new gay soap, Queer as Folk, has centered on the character of Brian, a 29-year-old sexual predator who, in Sunday's season premiere (10 pm/ET), seduces a 17-year-old virgin and then discards him like a dirty Kleenex. But it was going to take a lot more than a little statutory rape to scare unknown actor Gale Harold out of taking the role.
"Let's be honest, people are breaking the law in every way, in every state, at every second," Gale tells TV Guide Online, "and it's only a small percentage of people who are getting prosecuted for those crimes or even apprehended by the authorities. My point of view on taking this job is that I'm interested in real work... and it's just something that happens. It's not like we're making it up or doing it to try and say, 'Look at this! Freak out! Feel uncomfortable!' It's a real experience, it's something that goes on. And if people are not aware of it, then it's for a variety of reasons that I can't really be worried about."
Another thing not keeping Harold up nights is concern about Brian being too unsympathetic in the audience's eyes. "I think it would be counterproductive to try and make apologies for Brian in the early stages, because that would compromise his arc as a character," he says. "You don't want to redeem him early because then what's left to do? But I don't think there's any question in my mind that he has redeeming qualities, but those will be revealed to the viewers in time.
"That's one of the great things about the sсript," he adds, "it doesn't make any apologies. There's no obvious attempts to make him okay to balance out what he's doing that people recoil from, and that's good writing. The integrity of the character is intact — it's not being compromised."
Harold — who believes everyone has a little Brian in them, but "they just don't want to admit it" — has thus far declined to discuss his own sexual orientation in the press. (Randy Harrison, who plays his high school conquest Justin, has admitted he's gay, as has co-star Peter Paige.) "It's not that I'm refusing to say anything, it's that I don't have any interest in talking about things that I feel are irrelevant," he explains. "For me, it's just about the job and maintaining the character."
2 Gale Force
By Jim Caruso for Theatremania.com, April 19, 2001
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Gale Harold is having a good year. As the star of Showtime's smash hit Queer as Folk, he has set tongues a-wagging and hearts aflutter in the role of the gay stud-sexpot Brian Kinney. Now, just to mix things up a bit, he's taken on the role of the homophobic nephew in Uncle Bob for the Rebellion Theatre Company. Written by Austin Pendleton, the two-character plays opens April 23 at the Soho Playhouse. It details the complicated relationship between a self-loathing victim of AIDS (played brilliantly by George Morfogen), who is facing a meaningless death, and his disturbed young nephew (Harold), who is facing a meaningless life. I caught up with Harold recently for a pre-opening interview.
JC: Let's start at the very beginning: Where are you from?
GH: I'm from Atlanta. A lot of my family is still there, but they're kind of all spread out. I moved around quite a bit after high school, then ended up at the San Francisco Art Institute.
JC: You're a painter?
GH: No, I'm a photographer and screen printer. Through that, I got to know a lot of performance artists and people in the local underground theater scene. When they started to get into more traditional stuff, I started to see that as a possibility for myself. I was never really able to make any connection as a visual artist, so I walked away from it all. It was an organic thing. I sort of drifted into the theater.
JC: This drifting is a rather recent event, correct?
GH: Yes. It was in 1995.
JC: So, you didn't dream of being an actor as a kid?
GH: No. My parents weren't theater people at all, so I didn't ever think about show business as a possibility.
JC: Your career is growing so fast, between the play and the TV series. I wonder if you have time to enjoy it all.
GH: I guess it's all kind of a swirl, but being able to do a show like Uncle Bob is exactly what I want. After I started studying, doing scene work, and rethinking what "drama" was all about, I only wanted to be in plays. I moved to L.A. so that I could study with a new teacher...plus the fact that I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco anymore!
JC: Where did you study in Los Angeles? GH: The Actor's Conservatory Program at A Noise Within. They do classical work, and their outreach to young actors is great. It's a six-month program. Very intense.
JC: Tell me about your character, Josh, in Uncle Bob. Isn't it interesting that you're playing a homophobe in this play when you're playing such an out, gay character in Queer as Folk?
GH: Well, Josh isn't a fag-basher by any stretch. I think that, if his uncle hadn't been infected with the AIDS virus, he might not be so homophobic. The actual mechanics of Uncle Bob's sexuality have really screwed with Josh's head. He thinks his uncle is a genius, and he's the only person he has ever connected with.
JC: The play ends with a lot of unanswered questions; the audience is left to decide what happens. Have you chosen an outcome in your mind?
GH: No. I let the play end right where it ends. Uncle Bob is like a snapshot of life. The trajectory of the characters is clear; you see where they start and where they are headed, but there's no happy ending where the ends are tied up neatly. There's no structural resolution. I'm not sure what Austin's intention was, but you really get involved with the relationship of the characters. The play is about their struggle. That's so interesting for me, because it's like eavesdropping.
JC: You sure have a lot going on in your life right now. Not many actors working Off-Broadway have their faces plastered on a huge billboard for a TV series right in the middle of the theater district. Is there someone in your life that grounds you, the way Josh grounds Uncle Bob?
GH: Not really. Just working keeps me grounded. Plus, I didn't grow up dreaming of this, so I didn't have any high expectations. That keeps me completely engaged. It's a brand new experience on many different levels.
JC: With your TV success, have old friends and family been coming out of the woodwork to say hi?
GH: (laughing) I did get a very short e-mail from an old friend that just said, "Is that you?"
JC: I noticed on the Queer as Folk website message boards that most of your fans are female. That surprised me a little, considering your character's blatant homosexuality.
GH: I think it's the first time that women have had the chance to see this part of life, unless they're into buying male gay porn! It's very explicit. Men have been watching women make love to each other in magazines and films forever. If you're sexually attracted to men, it stands to reason that you might like to see two men in a sexual situation It's a real baseline dynamic! And it changes the power struggle, because women never got to see that. That's a bizarre sociological result of the show.
JC: What's the future of Queer as Folk?
GH: We've finished the first season and have been picked up for another. We're scheduled to start shooting again in July, although everything is hinging on the possible strike.
JC: How did you get the role of Brian?
GH: I auditioned, just like everyone else!
JC: Tell me about the character.
GH: He's very strong, extremely clear. He was created as a very sexualized, driven, unapologetic, unsentimental person. Since he's a gay man living in present-day America, the potential for being knocked out of his own orbit is really great. He lives his life at a fever pitch and seems like he's always stepping on hot rocks. I knew it would be a great role to play; but I'm learning that, working on episodic TV, you really don't get to evolve. If the character changes too much, it doesn't make a lot of sense to the audience. You have to let things happen slowly, which was difficult for me to conceptualize. Fortunately, Brian is not the type of guy to go through many changes!
JC: Who has inspired you as an actor?
GH: I saw The Play About the Baby, and Marian Seldes was so extremely alive in it. Of course, it's a brilliant role with great lines, but her delivery and timing were out of this world. It's like she's having a love affair with what she's doing on stage. At the time I saw her performance, I was trying to figure out how to deal with my character in Uncle Bob, and how to deal with the character of Uncle Bob. He's very sophisticated and impenetrable; Josh is trying to get through to him but, with his vernacular, speech patterns, and rhythms, Josh seems like a kid banging on a rock with a hammer. When I saw Marian Seldes, she made me realize what it means to be on stage. That feeling of communication is what pulled me from working with two-dimensional visual arts into the world of the theater.
3 Gale Force Wins, Queer as Folk's bad boy, Gale Harold, talks about Sex, Success, and his summer job.
From MetroSource, June/July 2001
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Brian Kinney is an asshole. After watching nearly a full season of Queer As Folk, I've seen enough to know that -- after watching the first episode, I'd seen enough to know that. I was there when he tossed Justin aside time after time. I was there when he reneged on his agreement to let Melanie have custody of Gus. I was there when he ruined Michael's birthday party. And now, he's sitting across the table from me.
Part of me expects him to stare for a moment, roll his eyes, say something deadpan and blow me off, a la Queer as Folk. But I'm quickly aware that it's Gale Harold, not Brian Kinney, with whom I'm talking. And Harold couldn't be any more different than Kinney, the character he plays on Showtime's hit series about a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh. He's friendly, warm and light-hearted, if not a bit haggard due to his hectic schedule.
Since taping for QAF ended in March, Harold has been in New York preparing for his Off-Broadway debut in Austin Pendleton's controversial dark comedy Uncle Bob, which had a month-long run at the SoHo Playhouse in New York, this past May. Harold had his first read-through with co-star George Morfogen, of HBO's OZ, on March 27, and hasn't had much rest since.
That doesn't mean he's not enjoying himself. "It's like sobering up after being on a long, Quaalude hangover," Harold says of being back on stage. "Not to say working on [QAF] isn't amazing -- 'cause it is. But it's a totally different state of mind and feeling."
Harold plays Josh, Uncle Bob's troubled, irresponsible twenty-something nephew who shows up -- uninvited -- at Bob's apartment during the last days of Bob's fight against AIDS. Harold enjoys the role because the character is so different from Brian, a calculating stoic who thrives on manipulation and exploitation. "[Josh] has never had any kind of meaningful relationship on any level with anyone except his uncle, but in a protracted, psychological imagined way, " he says of his character. "Even though he's full of all this energy and this feeling, he's really naive at the same time."
Harold, who began acting late in 1996, is no stranger to theatre. He grew up in Atlanta in the '70s, attended American University and dropped out after one year to study fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute. There, he discovered an interest in acting. "I fucked around with performance art, but I never really broke through in any way or felt like it was happening," he says.
When he moved to Los Angeles in 1997, he delved into it. Before getting the role of Brian Kinney last year, Harold starred in such productions as Me and My Friend at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, The Misanthrope and Cymbeline. In fact, it's the television show, not the stage, that's the new experience.
And getting into television brought its own set of complications for Harold, who is, for the first time, dealing with being a celebrity. Much speculation has arisen around Harold's sexual orientation, especially since he previously avoided the topic in interviews, unlike his co-stars. (Randy Harrison, who plays Justin, and Pater Paige, who plays Emmet, are both openly gay.) But the verdict's in, and he's bound to disappoint Folk watchers everywhere. "I'm straight," Harold says unequivocally. "And the reason that I haven't talked about it is because of the show and the way they were promoting it."
Harold is speaking of the extensive, country-wide ad campaign that began over six months before Folk even aired and which became more intense in the weeks before the show premiered in December. "My idea was to keep everything focused on the characters. I wanted [Brian] to have a chance. And I knew for him to have a chance he would have to be as much that character as completely as possible." So he opted to avoid discussion of his sexual orientation, which he now considers a dicey move, but is happy he did it.
Not only Harold, but everyone involved in QAF, has come under fire from critics and the public for the show's graphic depiction of the lives of gay men and lesbians in modern-day Pittsburgh. One of the harshest reviews came from the LA Times, which summed up the show as "relentless cruising and graphically simulated sex, at the expense of character depth, in an assembly line of orgasms." Ouch.
Harold vehemently disagrees that the show is just about sex. "I don't think that there's any exploitation going on because the characters are complete. They all have relationships, not only with their sexual partners but they have meaningful relationships with friends and family members," he explains. "If you take any slice of society and you go in and close up on it, depending on what day and what time of day, you may zoom in on two people fucking. Or you may zoom in on two people sitting around the table eating dinner."
And many times, QAF does happen to zoom in on two people fucking. And it's hard to deny that those sex scenes aren't graphic. But Harold's biggest concern is not getting naked with another man, but making the scenes look real, both mechanically and emotionally. "But in some of those scenes, there's obviously no emotional content at all," he laughs, "so it doesn't matter."
Playing a gay man -- even a gay man who has explicit sex frequently -- doesn't bother Harold at all. "there are real similarities to playing any other kind of scene," he says of his many steamy on- screen moments. Even when people think he's gay and call him "Brian" off the set, Harold finds the humor in it. He recalls one of the cast's public appearances at a business expo. "There were hundreds of people screaming Brian!" he laughs. "But that doesn't surprise me. I was prepared for that."
All in all, though, Harold shrugs off complaints that the show is too sexual or paints the gay community in a bad light. "I've heard from a lot of people that have said this how has changed their mind for the positive, has opened them to becoming closer and to becoming more understanding [of gays and lesbians]," he says. And for those who are still complaining, "Don't get hung up on the fact that you're watching something that's entertainment, 'cause if you're not being entertained, then turn it off and watch something else."
Regardless of what anyone says (many have praised the show, too), Showtime picked up QAF for a second season. So expect to see Brian, Justin, Michael and the gang back this fall. Filming resumes in July; that is, if the impending writer's union strike is resolved by then. And, unlike Brian Kinney would, Harold lights up at the thought of being reunited with his new friends. "I wasn't expecting this whole new family all of a sudden," he says of his QAF co-stars. "I'm already starting to look forward to going back."
4 Gale Force
By Frank DeCaro for TV Guide, June 16, 2001
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The sexy (and often naked) star of 'Queer as Folk' has come on strong this season-and become an accidental gay icon in the process.
Spending the spring in a Manhattan hotel so hip it hadn't officially opened yet is exactly what fans of 'Queer as Folk' would expect from Brian Kinney. But for Gale Harold, who plays the fashionable sex machine on Showtime's controversial hit about a group of gay nearly-thirtysomethings, this New York sojourn hasn't been one big orgy of sex, shopping and swank.
"It's been slightly frustrating," Harold says, using a word not present in his instantly gratified character's vocabulary. "The city is right there in my face, and I can't enjoy it because I'm so wrapped up in the play." The play is an off-Broadway revival of "Uncle Bob," a 1992 AIDS drama in which Harold is appearing as a sexually confused nephew who barges into the life of his dying, bitterly funny uncle (Oz's George Morfogen).
But Harold isn't complaining too much. He wanted to do a play or a film during his hiatus from Queer as Folk, and as it turns out, he's doing both before returning to Toronto in August to shoot 20 more episodes of the show for next season (the current season runs through June 24).
For the handsome leading man, who looks younger than his 31 years, the past year has been more action packed than the backroom at the show's fictional dance club, Babylon. An unknown actor who began performing only four years ago, Harold has become a hot commodity - and a heartthrob in the gay community - by baring almost all for the cameras as a hedonistic advertising hotshot who humps and bumps his way to gay yuppie nirvana.
The son of fundamentalist Pentecostal churchgoers, Harold is certainly not Brian. But he is just as cocksure, just as mysterious and just as deep. "He's intense, and he likes that people think that about him," says costar Randy Harrison, who plays Brian's underage boyfriend, Justin. "He seems more intense than he really is, though. Gale's sillier and laughs more than Brian does. He's kinder. And I don't think he's quite as manipulative."
Looking as if he just rolled out of bed, wearing an untucked light blue linen shirt, gray pants and sneakers, a cap, sunglasses and several days' worth of stubble hiding his face, Harold arrives at Manhattan's 60 Thompson hotel carrying coffee, a half-eaten bag of blue corn chips, a cell phone and a spiral notebook. Between puffs on American Spirit cigarettes, he explains how landing his role on Queer as Folk came at a point when he'd all but given up on having a television career. "A week and a half before I read for the part, I told my agent, 'Don't send me on any more TV auditions; it's all so trite," he recalls. But that was before he read the pilot sсript for the show that would change his life.
Series executive producers Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen were having trouble casting the role of the sexually predatory Brian Kinney when Harold showed up at the eleventh hour. "We kept pushing back the shooting date, and people were getting tense," remembers Lipman. "But when Mr. Gale Harold walked in, Ron and I looked at each other and absolutely knew," says Lipman. "He had a certain kind of cockiness. But he's very, very charming underneath all that. He has his own direction and agenda. There's no bull---- with him."
"[Gale] does things because he wants to, not because he feels obligated," says Michelle Clunie, who plays lesbian lawyer Melanie Marcus. "If he doesn't feel like showing up someplace, he just won't show up. But on the last day of shooting, he brought flowers for everyone. And when I broke up with my boyfriend and I couldn't quit crying, he just held me. He's a gentle, enigmatic and aloof spirit."
For Harold and the rest of the cast of mostly unknown actors, the hype surrounding the New York premiere of 'Queer as Folk' last November was a watershed moment. "It was overwhelming," says Harold. A sign in Times Square touting the series and bearing a picture of his face the size of a garage door stopped him in his tracks. "When I saw the billboard, it was like, 'Jesus Christ! They really believe in this thing and proved it with the money they poured into promoting it."
"It was a shock to his system," says Harrison. "All of a sudden you're being treated like you're a star." Harold, it seems, has not yet learned how to handle the press, but when he screws up - not showing up for an interview, for instance - he somehow manages to get away with it. "Someone who looks like him, it's hard to be that angry with," jokes Harrison.
Of course, the question many want answered is this: Is Harold as gay as the character he so convincingly plays? When 'Queer as Folk' premiered last fall, he was not discussing the matter. "I didn't have a career when this show started. I had nothing to talk about. I had no interest in discussing my sexual preference," he says. Unlike his fellow cast members, Hal Sparks and Chris Potter, who vehemently asserted their off-screen heterosexuality; or Harrison and Peter Paige, who are gay on the show and in real life, Harold remained mum until now. "I am straight," he maintains, "but if we're talking about 'Queer as Folk,' that's insignificant information."
"When we met him, Brian and Gale just fused," says Lipman. "Gale has such sexuality as a person that it's kind of daunting. How many people could be as open or fluid and bring that to a character? It doesn't have anything to do with being gay or straight." Adds Cowen, "He's breaking new ground for bringing sexuality to a performance, and not just gay sexuality. I don't think any other actor has ever done what he's doing. I think it s kind of historic."
To Harold, the speculation about his sexual orientation, even though he often has a girlfriend and is rumored to be dating Clunie, is nothing new. "When I was in high school, people asked me if I was gay. It's like if you're not slobbering on every woman in sight, you're hiding something," Harold says. That he liked reading William S. Burroughs and Oscar Wilde didn't help.
A decent student - "I wasn't a slouch, but I wasn't a Mensa society member" -Harold remembers his youth in Atlanta as a time of "T-top Trans Ams and rock and roll." A middle child - he has an older sister and a younger brother- Harold excelled at soccer and landed a scholarship at American University in Washington, D.C. After one semester, he relocated to San Francisco and, at the city's Art Institute, studied photography, screen-printing and film. He didn't finish the program there, either. "I got so much in debt that I decided to pull the plug and work," he says.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and, encouraged by a producer friend, took acting classes that led to roles in West Coast stage productions of "Me and My Friend," "The Misanthrope," and "Cymbeline." "I'd always been interested in film, but being an actor had never occurred to me. I never thought I'd be on television." The fact that he landed on such a hot series his first time out, he says, makes him "ridiculously lucky."
Although critically lauded and well rated, 'Queer as Folk' has been the subject of much debate in the gay community. "Some people say it's not real life. That it's over the top and almost fantastical, with an overabundance of fabulous gay circumstances," Harold admits. "But I feel lucky to be on something that people watch and may love or may hate. I wouldn't want to be on a show that was an autopilot default success."
His parents are divided when it comes to the show. "My dad watches - he's supportive," Harold says. "He's not involved in the churches anymore." Harold's mother, still deeply religious, doesn't watch the series. "My mom and I come from completely opposite philosophical perspectives. But she's supportive of me as a human being and an actor." The role of Brian Kinney, however controversial, has opened doors for Harold. "The difference now is that I have access to scripts because I've gotten some exposure," he says. Certainly, it's more exposure than many actors have ever had on television.
5 TV Talkback - Gale Force By Eirik Knutzen for The Toronto Star, October 20, 2001
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Q - Could you please give me some information about the handsome actor Gale Harold, who plays Brian (Kinney) on the Showcase series, Queer As Folk. What other acting has he done, where is he from, and how old is he? - Catherine MacFarlane, Hamilton
A - Gale Harold was born July 10, 1969, Atlanta, Georgia, and raised by God-fearing parents. His mother is considered a lay minister in the Southern Penetecostal Fundamentalist Church. He attended American University in Washington, D.C., on a soccer scholarship to study Romance Literature, but dropped out six months later after a serious dispute with his coach. He went on to study Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, but always made a living restoring MotoGuzzi Italian motorcycles. On the brink of financial disaster in 1997, a producer for Francis Ford Coppola convinced Harold to take his act to the stage. After acting studies in L.A., he joined the off-Broadway production of "Uncle Bob" and squeezed in a TV commercial for the Pontiac Aztek. By several accounts, he is dating Michelle Clunie - who portrays Melanie, the sexy lesbian, on Queer.
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6 Gale Force. Gale Harold is the raciest man on television in Queer as Folk, offscreen he's just a super sexy heterosexual
By Karen Robinovitz for Flaunt Magazine, February 2002--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As alter ego Brian Kinney, he's gotten head in a nightclub, devirginized a 17-year-old boy, and shoved his tongue down dozens of men's throats - just another day at the office for Queer as Folk's Gale Harold.
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Gale Harold is afraid to out himself...as a straight man. The impossibly gorgeous 31-year-old plays Brian Kinney, a smokin' hot sex fiend who beds five men a week on Showtime's anal-positive, gay sitcom Queer as Folk. Since the show began, Harold has given millions of hungry gay men (and women) a delicious taste of his naked body—we've seen scrotum and cotton-candy lips. He's gotten head in a nightclub, devirginized a sweet 17-year-old boy, and shoved his tongue down dozens of men's throats—some of the most graphic guy-on-guy action ever seen on TV (Shaving Ryan's Privates not included).
So the first real question I ask the rising star, when we met on a brisk afternoon at a quaint wine bar in the West Village, was, appropriately, "Gay or straight?" He takes a bite of his goat cheese panini and points to my tape recorder, motioning for me to shut it off. We sit in silence. He turns his head away, rests his square-toed brown boots on the window ledge, and contemplates.
"I can't figure out what to do with this question. Most of the gay men I work with assume I'm straight, so..." More silence. He sips his merlot and eventually continues. "It's funny. No, it's just...trying to answer this question is hilarious." "But you didn't answer," I probe. More silence. "I'm straight. I'm begrudgingly revealing it. I guess it's just that I was thinking which publication should I reveal this to," he finally admits, as if being straight is a crime. He's also single.
Harold's a total guy's guy. He's wearing black Levi's, a knit-wool hat with a cobra snake patch, a black V-neck sweater, a leather cuff bracelet, and a fierce tattoo on the inside of his middle right finger that reads "Resist." He won't discuss the marking. "Don't talk about that."
Harold does, however, talk lovingly about his pickup truck (“I can finally afford to pay for it," he says). Before his big break on cable, he spent three years doing odd jobs, construction work and carpentry in Los Angeles. He went to American University for a year-and-a-half on a soccer scholarship. He's obsessed with Italian motorcycles. And maybe it's the bong hit he confessed to doing before our interview or his Southern upbringing—he's a good ol' Atlanta boy—but he has a mellow, refreshingly laid-back quality that reminds me of Matthew McConaughey.
He puffs on an American Spirit as he speculates, upon my urging, the difference between kissing men and kissing women: "Kissing a man...it's more animalistic. There's a primal drive with men and you can feel that the second you start kissing. It's much more visceral than kissing a woman. Women take their time. There's more play. It's not a mad dash to get your rocks off. And kissing men has made me appreciate kissing women more. I have kissed men who, even after they just shaved, have the roughest skin. I've gotten the worst fuckin' burns on my face."
While most straight men would probably go on about how it's difficult to make out with guy after guy after guy, even for the sake of their art, Harold is very "whatever" about the whole thing. "For a while, the gay thing seemed like such a big deal. But now, I don't think it is. It's just a comedy-drama about people who live in the United States. It's a slice-of-life. I play a character—that's it. But I was well aware of gay lifestyle before the show. I've been hit on in a really strong way by gay men who've tried to convert me, and a lot of my heroes are gay. William Burroughs. Lou Reed. Well, I guess Lou Reed is bi. The point is, it's 2002, gay life is no longer that shocking."
But some of the things television's new boy toy witnesses on the set are rather—um—shocking. "The shit that goes on! I could be walking by the set, eating a doughnut, and there's 30 gay men rolling around. It's actually hysterical," he says, adding that he doesn't mind being objectified for the camera. (In one scene, Harold slowly strips off his clothes, pours water on his head, and asks a strapping young lad if he's coming or going...or coming and then going...or coming and staying.)
"I think it's good that men are being objectified because since forever women have been objectified. We're flipping the coin because things have been lopsided on TV and film for so long. Another good point to the show is that it portrays men's sensuality. They're not just all about sex and only sex," he philosophizes.
He's right. The show isn't only about sex. It's also about—well—oral sex, which makes us happy as folk.
7 Gale Force. Still here, Still queer (as Folk)
Queer as Folk's Feisty Gale Harold takes aim against homophobia, fame, and critics and his character, Brian
By Michael Rowe for The Advocate, February 05, 2002
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The tall, slender man locking his bicycle outside an unpretentious Toronto restaurant is wearing a fedora tilted down over his eyes in a way that suggests a desire for great distance, as though a veil of invioability has been drawn about him like an invisible cloak. One someone else, the hat might be a bohimian affectation. For 32-year-old actor Gale Harold, it's a practical strategy. Anonymity--or inviolability, for that matter--has become a rare commodity in the 13 months since his character, Brian Kinney, the gay white shark of Showtime's Queer as Folk, seared himself into gay consciousness and pop culture.
If Harold could mark off more private territory—for instance, never do another celebrity profile—he would. Questions about what it's like to be a straight man playing gay or what it feels like to be so handsome exasperate him beyond distraction. He doesn't like fame or trust its motivation.
I'm grateful for the attention," he says of his fans' devotion, "because it validates that I'm doing something." But even as he says this, Harold points out that it sounds like something hundreds of overexposed celebrities have already said. As he talks, reaching past the conventions of celebrityspeak for something truer, you begin to realize that if you thought this man was just some diva of the month, you could not be more wrong.
"Gale has very strong opinions, and he's very political," says Queer as Folk executive producer Ron Cowen, with no small measure of pride. "Sometimes I think he's the smartest person I've ever met. I know a lot of smart, well-educated, well-read people. But there's something about Gale where it takes a leap from education or keen intelligence to some other place. Genius is a cheap word, especially in Hollywood. But he's really smart."
Inside the restaurant, the waiter has brought him a cup of tea, and we have ordered lunch. "How could I not be ambivalent?" Harold says, talking about his new fame. (He'll reluctantly, and with some humor, accede to being a "semi-junior league star.") "If being famous means that you get to work on great projects all the time, with great people, then my idea of fame may include that. But," he says with distaste, "it doesn't necessarily includefame."
Harold acknowledges that television culture creates a spurious intimacy. "There's a genuine human impulse to want to know more about people you're interested in, for whatever reason," he says. "But that impulse has been manipulated as an industry—-a bad industly--to sustain itself. It can be tweaked by publicists and studios. It didn't develop as a benevolent machine to provide more pleasure to people. It developed as a tool to sustain itself."
Nevertheless, the story of Harold's casting in Queer as Folk has that Hollywood-miracle aura that publicists love. Executive producers Cowen and Daniel Lipman, the Emmy-award winning writers of the groundbreaking AIDS drama An Early Frost and the long-running drama series Sisters, had acquired the American rights to the British drama series Queer as Folk. They had already cast actors Scott Lowell, Peter Paige, Hal Sparks, and Randy Harrison as a group of gay friends whose intertwined lives would form the basis for the American version of the story. The casting had been nightmarish for Lipman and Cowen because agents wouldn't send their clients in to read for the parts in the show. The part of Brian Kinney was particularly difficult.
"Here's a gay man, very sexual, very masculine, not the kind of gay character people are used to seeing," says Lipman. "If he were a straight male character fucking every woman in sight, he'd be a hero. So this was not like the other roles, and that was part of the difficulty."
"It was an extremely distressing experience trying to cast Brian, because of what we discovered to be the massive amount of homophobia [in Hollywood]," says Cowen. "We were so shocked and so upset, because we went into this thinking that in the years since An Early Frost things had changed. What we had discovered was that things hadn't changed one iota."
Late on a Friday afternoon, with an 8:30 A.M. Monday meeting scheduled to introduce their cast to the Showtime executives, Lipman and Cowen still didn't have their Brian Kinney.
"It was a test of faith, and by Friday at 5 P.M. faith was running out," Lipman says ruefully. At 5:45 P.M., their casting director called. "She said, 'Come on over right now, he's here!' " Lipman recalls. "In walks Gale Harold, and we're looking at him and he's reading the scene, and Ron and I are looking at each other, and it's like, Is he fucking fabulous?"
"He fell out of the sky," Cowen breathes. "There's truly no other explanation."
Lipman asked Harold to be at the Showtime offices in Los Angeles at 8 A.M. on Monday. "He lit up a cigarette, and, very Brianesque, he said, I'm with this repertory company, and we have to strike a set on Sunday night, and I don't think I can make it.' And we're thinking, Is he for real? Who says that? We've been in Hollywood too long. What do you say to that?" Lipman laughs, shaking his head in disbelief. He pressed a copy of the sсript into Harold's arms and asked him to read it and call them at home the next day.
"I was standing in the kitchen," Cowen remembers, "and the phone rang and a voice said, 'Hi, this is Brian Kinney.' "
"What helped me recover," says Cowen, describing the aftermath of the casting experience that clearly devastated him both as a filmmaker and as a gay man, "was that Gale was brave enough to take the part. It was the same way with Aidan Quinn [who was one of the few actors willing to consider An Early Frost, in which he starred as a gay man with AIDS]. You need the one actor who is not afraid and who is very politically committed to what he's doing. In a way, that was the emotional salvation."
Harold, it seems, has always been asking questions. He was raised in the Atlanta suburbs by an engineer father and a mother who sold real estate. His parents were devout Pentecostals, and his childhood was a classic Southern melange of church, school, and sports. "There were so many little things about my childhood that were Southern," he says, "and so many that were suburban American. There was a dairy farm behind my house at one point."
Harold manifested an early affinity for soccer, which he calls "a beautiful game." As he moved toward adolescence, however, he began to be concerned about the culture that went along with the game.
"I burned out very rapidly on what you refer to as 'jocks,'" he says. "I couldn't really handle that state of mind. I don't know what it's like to be a girl in team sports, but definitely for a guy in the States, there are so many flag-waving impulses forced upon you. Excellence in sports is a good way to keep you moving in the direction of allegiance to your school and your country."
Although he didn't have the terminology at the time, young Gale observed the homophobia woven into the fabric of his suburban world, both on the playing fields of Southwest DeKalb High School and in his parents' church. He is careful not to dwell on the subject of religion out of respect for his mother, who is still Pentecostal. (His father left the church several years ago).
"I started to lose all interest [in religion] at around 15, around the time I got my driver's licenser Harold remembers. "I knew it was bullshit, you know? The choir director was gay. The assistant choir director was gay. Most of the men in the choir were gay. It was obvious. And these were people I talked to and grew up knowing. These were my friends, and my parents' friends, and members of the church. And they're up there singing and clapping their hands, then they sit down and some ogre walks up and starts saying something that is basically potentially fatal under the right circumstances. And we know how fast those circumstances can shift and become dangerous.
"I think [today] it's probably gotten easier and easier for people to deal with," he muses, "but it's still a monumental achievement for some people to say, Tou're gay, can we talk?' They're so scared, because they don't know what it means about them, about God. I would not want to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, even now."
Likewise on the playing field, where Harold was once forbidden to play soccer because his hair was too long. The explanation was that it made him look unmasculine. Furthermore, "because he took my side, our goalkeeper wasn't allowed to play either." Harold sighs. "When you're a kid you instinctively know when someone's blowing smoke up your ass. You react to it, or you don't."
Atlanta, even then, was a culturally mixed city. The best record stores were in gay neighborhoods, and Harold and his close friends would often find themselves rifling through the stacks. "You look up and realize, Oh, this is the deal," he shrugs, recalling his nascent awareness of a larger gay presence.
Closer to home he had friends he says he knew were gay. But it wasn't discussed. "Say I'm 15 years old," he suggests, remembering. "And I know you're gay. And you know I know. We never actually talk about it because you never bring it up, and I don't feel like invading whatever that might be. We're not going to feel compelled to go there. I never had one of those moments when someone came out to me as a confidant," he says. "The acknowledgment was already strong enough. It wasn't like they needed me to tell them that I knew."
After high school, Harold won a soccer scholarship to American University, but he dropped out after a year and moved to San Francisco, studying fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. He supported himself with a series of low-paying jobs tailor-made for a young man searching.
"I was waiting tables, taking out the trash, painting houses. A bunch of menial shit,"he says cheerfully. As time passed, though, he got restless: "I wasn't looking [for a direction], and life had started getting beyond the point of enjoyment, you know?" When a friend asked him to appear in a movie (which, in the end, was never made), Harold's interest was piqued.
With the dot-coms booming, San Francisco was becoming too pricey. When the building where he lived was sold and turned into a parking garage, Harold took it as an omen. "I knew at some point I was going to have to do something," Harold says. He left for Los Angeles in 1997. "I'd met an acting teacher there I was intrigued by, and I took a weeklong workshop," he recalls.
The craft of acting struck Harold in a way that two-dimensional media didn't. Waiting tables to support himself, he studied, he says, "to the exclusion of everything else, for a solid year and a half." A manager who'd seen him in a play signed him. For a year, Harold made the actor's boot camp round of auditions. Nothing clicked. At one point he asked his manager to stop sending him out for television work, sure that there was nothing for him in that medium. Then, of course, came Brian.
By the time we head over to the QAF production office to continue our conversation, Harold is ready to talk about his controversial on-screen character. "There was an attraction," he concedes, when asked if the chance to play a sexual hunter-gatherer like Brian Kinney--as far from the "gay upstairs neighbor" as possible—appealed to him. "Another attraction was that it was an interesting story. It wasn't West Hollywood, 90210, which I would never have been called in for. I'm not that 'type.'"
Harold's initial take was that the character would best be played as "a cross between Lou Reed and Oscar Wilde, with a gold tooth, and go completely over the top with it. Now we know that I can't do that," he says mischievously, "though I still think that's how it should be done. It would be a lot dirtier. But he's not allowed to be that." Nor does he buy into the notion that Brian is a pure predator. "You have to like your character, because if you don't, no one else will either. And if the point of the show is to create a character that nobody likes and everybody hates, that would be the way to go. Make him a predator. But I liked Stuart [the character on whom Brian is based]! I liked the guy."
The thought that he might be type-cast playing a gay man never occurred to him when he considered whether or not to take the role. He had asked a gay actor friend whether he should accept the part, not because of Brian's sexual orientation but because of the show's merit. "If you want to be an actor," his friend told him, "then act. "
"There was the creative impulse and the chance to do something," Harold says honestly, "but there was also $1,400 worth of parking tickets and back registration on my truck." As he owed money to friends and back rent to landlords, the pragmatist in Harold knew It was time to grow up. I'd been through the 'hangdog barely making if thing over and over again. Your options run out." Looking back, he says, he realizes that "the only difference between me now and me then, aside from the experience I've gained working on the show, is that I have money. That I'm able to support myself and pay off my student loans. And the ability to make things right with people over time. That becomes a really important thing as you turn 30."
This brings up one of those boilerplate questions Harold dislikes: Is he at all worried that his role in Queer as Folk might negatively affect his professional future? His answer is swift.
"If someone doesn't want to work with me because I'm playing a gay character, I don't want to work with them," he says calmly. "They can fuck off."
Even that succinct statement is more than Harold made to the press when Queer as Folk began. As speculation swirled about which of the actors were actually queer folk, Peter Paige and Randy Harrison identified as gay, Scott Lowell talked about his wife, and Hal Sparks discussed his instinctive discomfort during man-on-man sex scenes.
Gale Harold said ...nothing. Friends still fax him items pulled off the Net, comments that he allegedly made in interviews, "basically putting me in line with other heterosexual actors and their comments." But Harold continues as he started. He doesn't want to make what he calls "pretentious" comments on gay life, heterosexual life, or his own love life.
"Gale is totally cool and secure enough not to be threatened by anything," adds Ron Cowen. "He knows who he is. That makes him more than an actor; it makes him a very fine human being."
Another question that comes up constantly involves the nudity and the sex with other men. But the question people never manage to ask, though they want to, is "How on earth do you manage it?"—the implication being "Doesn't it disgust you as a straight man?" Rather than addressing that homophobic question, the man who rocked Middle America in the first episode of Queer as Folk (when his character boldly instructed Randy Harrison's character on rimming) is matter-of-fact about the mechanics of on-screen sex.
"We have a really good crew," he says casually. "Between the actors and the cooperation of the producers, we've been able to establish a protocol for the show, where every sex scene has a 'sex meeting.' The director has a shot list of what he wants. It not only demystifies it, but it's like a rehearsal for scenes that aren't rehearsed. If you know what you're going to do and why, when you're actually there doing it, you can. You're not thinking, What the fuck is going on? Where's the camera? Why are we rotting again? Why am I doing this again? You don't have to deal with it. You understand the scene."
Harold is amused by the responses he gets in public. Heterosexual women beg him to tell them he's straight. As for heterosexual men, he says, "The responses range from 'My wife loves the show!' to 1 loved the show; it's funny as hell!' " Gay men love or loathe Brian Kinney, and Harold sometimes gets the runoff. Example? At a Toronto Film Festival party, he heard an expletive fired his way as he passed a group of men he didn't know. "But you can't even acknowledge that as a negative response, really," Harold says philosophically.
His family, for their part, seem to have taken his newfound high profile and growing fame in stride. "Some of them were shocked," Harold muses, "just by the fact that I had a job. I just let the information come out [bit by bit], so that by the time they actually realized I was on a television show with a budget and that I was getting paid and flying first class in airplanes, they were, like, 'Jesus, that's beyond anything we've ever considered.' "
The key to understanding Gale Harold is likely not going to be found in this interview, or in any of the other interviews he's sat for since he became "Brian on Queer as Folk It might instead be found by examining where he went while on summer hiatus, before the new season began shooting.
Instead of heading off to Los Angeles to capitalize on his Brian Kinney status, Harold packed up and headed to the tiny SoHo Playhouse in New York to appear with George Morfogen in a low-budget production of Austin Pendleton's AIDS drama, Uncle Bob. The stage was his first love, and he had arranged a summer tryst.
His personal publicity from Queer as Folk followed him to New York as he tried to prepare for his stage role. "It was very distracting," he says. "It was a blessing and curse. I wish it had just been the director and I."
Has he ever woken up and asked himself what he thought he was doing when he took on a role as potentially defining as Brian Kinney? "I haven't, no," he answers. "I've woken up after seeing this," he adds, brandishing a page from a high-fashion magazine featuring him sulking elegantly for the camera, "and asked myself what I thought I was doing. Or seeing my cover for MetroSource, which was such a cheese dish, and said 'What the fuck am I doing? I'm supposed to be working on a play!'"
A publicist knocks on the door to see how the interview is going thus far. Harold smiles with genuine courtesy, but at that moment, it's clear there's one place he wants to be--back at work on the set, acting. He's right: Interviews can be an enormous cheese dish.
"If anyone can crack the publicity nut and figure out how to not come across hammy and contrived," he says, sighing, "I'd love to talk to them."
8. FULL FORCE GALE By P.J. Reno for IN MAGAZINE LA 20-Jun 2004
Best known for his role as gaylothario-slash-horn-dog Brian Kinney on Showtime’s Queer As Folk, actor Gale Harold’s upcoming feature Wake isn’t exactly what people may expect. Instead of playing the cool heartbreaker among a world of caring friends, Harold jumps into the role of Kyle Riven, a mental patient who comes home to visit his ailing mother. Things get complicated when his brother Sebastian asks him for medication to help euthanize their mother, and his violent, on-the-lam brother Ray shows up with their fourth brother, Jack, and two strippers. What starts off as a perverse family reunion brings out brotherly secrets, repressed anger, madness, and ultimately death. Not exactly a night of laughs and sex at Babylon, the night club on Queer As Folk. Why would Harold be drawn to something like Wake?
“To be frank, a lot of what attracted me to the film was the fact that my friends were making it,” he admitted, noting that his friend Henry LeRoy “Roy” Finch was writing and directing, and his producing partner/wife Susan-Landau Finch had put the project together. It turned out that Wake was a jumping- off point for all of them.
“It was my first lead role in a feature film, and it was Roy’s first feature directing, so that’s something I’ll never experience again like that, just jumping off and going for it,” Harold explained. “Furthermore, Roy had really ambitious and personal ideas about how he wanted to direct the film and how he wanted to structure it. And one of the beautiful things about doing something for the first time is you don’t have that fear of ‘Well, this is a complicated or oblique or abstract way of trying to work.’ You just want to do it. And you had the further excitement of not really having any money.”
The film, shot entirely on location in Bath, Maine, in a house originally built in 1745, was a friend and family affair. Landau-Finch’s Oscar-winning father, Martin Landau, appears in a cameo role, and the shoestring production forced everyone to get into the spirit of the alternative and eclectic nature of the film.
For Harold, the freeform spirit of the shoot helped him understand the character of Kyle, who ends up taking the medication slated for his sick mother. “He starts off in one very kind of sedate specific place,” Harold said, “which is maintaining a state of mind, trying to deal with chemical problems, and he seems to have it under control, and that very rapidly deteriorates to a place of being totally out of control. The question then is, ‘Will he be able to survive going there and coming back?’ So it was a lot to play, a lot of distance to cover. He wasn’t just observing the action, he was in the very center of the action.”
After three seasons on Queer As Folk, it was easy for Harold to see the difference between shooting a series and working on a film like Wake For an actor, the differences between the experience of working as a series regular on a TV show and starring in an independent feature couldn’t be more distinct.
“It’s always the writer’s genesis, but in something like Wake the characters kind of get born, live, and die while you’re making the movie,” he explained. “To some degree, in the television world, the characters are wrapped up before you ever meet them in a way, and you’re at the mercy of that process. And to be fair, you can’t have every actor on a television show kind of trying to make it up as they go along because it will never get done. But there is something to be said once the cameras get turned on and you’re in the room, and you really want to give a twist or give a deeper color to what is there, and you’re just told ‘That’s just not what we really want.’ And that’s a hard thing to hear, but you have to make those kinds of concessions. Luckily for me I’ve had the opportunity to do both—be in a very rigorous, controlled, environment that pays well, and work on a lot more challenging, frightening, seat-ofyour- pants things basically done for the thrill of it.”
Snagging a television role is a great gig for any actor, but there can often be a price to pay if you get stereotyped, offered roles that are a variation of what already has been done. Harold, however, doesn’t see himself falling into that trap, thanks to Brian’s unique place in television.
“One thing that can be said about it, there are not a lot of characters really like him,” Harold said of Brian. “Since I’ve been working on Queer As Folk, most of the work I’ve done has been quite different. He’s so specific that almost anyone next to him would have an easily identifiable difference or makeup.”
Harold, who was born and raised in Georgia, went to American University in Washington, D.C., and studied finearts at the San Francisco Art Institute, is now part of a film where he’s one of the draws. Now a recognizable face thanks to Queer As Folk, Harold gets noticed. It also means he has to deal with fans and media that are interested in engaging with him about his career. While that may be a fun perk for actors looking for attention, Harold sees it as a potential challenge if he lets it get in the way of his work.
“Later on, hopefully if I have a career that lasts, if I have a chance to do a lot more different things to flesh out my work, I think it will be easier for me,” he said. “I’m kind of trying to run from the calcification of being told you’re doing a good job all the time, because you sort of start to lean back on that. Or you just become too comfortable. It’s potentially damaging. That’s not really what it’s about. That kind of notoriety is outsized by what will help you grow, or keep you aware of what will allow you to be an actor or be in touch. It’s not that big of a deal or a nightmare or anything, but it can be an obstacle. And I’m not Brian Kinney. That’s an important thing, too. He exists on television. How they respond to him good or bad, that’s him. I can’t do anything about that.”
Sooner rather than later, Queer As Folk will come to an end, and Harold hopes he will be moving on to other roles. Now that the thrill of his first feature is behind him, The question is, where will Harold be in five years in terms of his acting?
“I want to be five years ahead of where I am now,” Harold explained. “I don’t mean that to be trite; I want to keep developing. I want to become relaxed in my own work and go deeper. Just growing and studying and trying new things and hopefully having professional access to work that’s good and interesting. I don’t want to be on the treadmill of artificiality.”
9. GALE'S FORCE - From the Showtime site. RedZone. 08.05.2003
Hot as ever on QUEER AS FOLK, Gale Harold diversifies his resume
в каментах moveforever.diary.ru/p153543434.htm&from=0#6167...
upd 8... но это уже 2004, да и слова местами поменяны - прогресс... ну, все на этом или куда?))
upd нет, не все, еще одну, состовляя список упустила - итого 9, значит
1 Introducing Queer's Gale Force - TV Guide, December 01, 2000
2 Gale Force, By Jim Caruso for Theatremania.com, April 19, 2001
3 Gale Force Wins, Queer as Folk's bad boy, Gale Harold, talks about Sex, Success, and his summer job. From MetroSource, June/July 2001
4 Gale Force By Frank DeCaro for TV Guide, June 16, 2001
5 TV Talkback - Gale Force By Eirik Knutzen for The Toronto Star, October 20, 2001
6 Gale Force. Gale Harold is the raciest man on television in Queer as Folk, offscreen he's just a super sexy heterosexual By Karen Robinovitz for Flaunt Magazine, February 2002
7 Gale Force. By Michael Rowe for The Advocate, February 05, 2002
8 FULL FORCE GALE By P.J. Reno for IN MAGAZINE LA 20-Jun 2004
9 GALE’S FORCE: Hot as ever on QUEER AS FOLK, Gale Harold diversifies his resume. RedZone. May 8, 2003
если кому интересно - сами статьи (на английском, у одной или двух вроде, впрочем существуют переводы - 4 переведены - спасибо ele phant за уточнение... добавить что ль ссылки на переводы еще)))
читать статьи
1 Introducing Queer's Gale Force
By Michael Ausiello for TV Guide, December 01, 2000
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Much of the controversy surrounding Showtime's provocative new gay soap, Queer as Folk, has centered on the character of Brian, a 29-year-old sexual predator who, in Sunday's season premiere (10 pm/ET), seduces a 17-year-old virgin and then discards him like a dirty Kleenex. But it was going to take a lot more than a little statutory rape to scare unknown actor Gale Harold out of taking the role.
"Let's be honest, people are breaking the law in every way, in every state, at every second," Gale tells TV Guide Online, "and it's only a small percentage of people who are getting prosecuted for those crimes or even apprehended by the authorities. My point of view on taking this job is that I'm interested in real work... and it's just something that happens. It's not like we're making it up or doing it to try and say, 'Look at this! Freak out! Feel uncomfortable!' It's a real experience, it's something that goes on. And if people are not aware of it, then it's for a variety of reasons that I can't really be worried about."
Another thing not keeping Harold up nights is concern about Brian being too unsympathetic in the audience's eyes. "I think it would be counterproductive to try and make apologies for Brian in the early stages, because that would compromise his arc as a character," he says. "You don't want to redeem him early because then what's left to do? But I don't think there's any question in my mind that he has redeeming qualities, but those will be revealed to the viewers in time.
"That's one of the great things about the sсript," he adds, "it doesn't make any apologies. There's no obvious attempts to make him okay to balance out what he's doing that people recoil from, and that's good writing. The integrity of the character is intact — it's not being compromised."
Harold — who believes everyone has a little Brian in them, but "they just don't want to admit it" — has thus far declined to discuss his own sexual orientation in the press. (Randy Harrison, who plays his high school conquest Justin, has admitted he's gay, as has co-star Peter Paige.) "It's not that I'm refusing to say anything, it's that I don't have any interest in talking about things that I feel are irrelevant," he explains. "For me, it's just about the job and maintaining the character."
2 Gale Force
By Jim Caruso for Theatremania.com, April 19, 2001
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Gale Harold is having a good year. As the star of Showtime's smash hit Queer as Folk, he has set tongues a-wagging and hearts aflutter in the role of the gay stud-sexpot Brian Kinney. Now, just to mix things up a bit, he's taken on the role of the homophobic nephew in Uncle Bob for the Rebellion Theatre Company. Written by Austin Pendleton, the two-character plays opens April 23 at the Soho Playhouse. It details the complicated relationship between a self-loathing victim of AIDS (played brilliantly by George Morfogen), who is facing a meaningless death, and his disturbed young nephew (Harold), who is facing a meaningless life. I caught up with Harold recently for a pre-opening interview.
JC: Let's start at the very beginning: Where are you from?
GH: I'm from Atlanta. A lot of my family is still there, but they're kind of all spread out. I moved around quite a bit after high school, then ended up at the San Francisco Art Institute.
JC: You're a painter?
GH: No, I'm a photographer and screen printer. Through that, I got to know a lot of performance artists and people in the local underground theater scene. When they started to get into more traditional stuff, I started to see that as a possibility for myself. I was never really able to make any connection as a visual artist, so I walked away from it all. It was an organic thing. I sort of drifted into the theater.
JC: This drifting is a rather recent event, correct?
GH: Yes. It was in 1995.
JC: So, you didn't dream of being an actor as a kid?
GH: No. My parents weren't theater people at all, so I didn't ever think about show business as a possibility.
JC: Your career is growing so fast, between the play and the TV series. I wonder if you have time to enjoy it all.
GH: I guess it's all kind of a swirl, but being able to do a show like Uncle Bob is exactly what I want. After I started studying, doing scene work, and rethinking what "drama" was all about, I only wanted to be in plays. I moved to L.A. so that I could study with a new teacher...plus the fact that I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco anymore!
JC: Where did you study in Los Angeles? GH: The Actor's Conservatory Program at A Noise Within. They do classical work, and their outreach to young actors is great. It's a six-month program. Very intense.
JC: Tell me about your character, Josh, in Uncle Bob. Isn't it interesting that you're playing a homophobe in this play when you're playing such an out, gay character in Queer as Folk?
GH: Well, Josh isn't a fag-basher by any stretch. I think that, if his uncle hadn't been infected with the AIDS virus, he might not be so homophobic. The actual mechanics of Uncle Bob's sexuality have really screwed with Josh's head. He thinks his uncle is a genius, and he's the only person he has ever connected with.
JC: The play ends with a lot of unanswered questions; the audience is left to decide what happens. Have you chosen an outcome in your mind?
GH: No. I let the play end right where it ends. Uncle Bob is like a snapshot of life. The trajectory of the characters is clear; you see where they start and where they are headed, but there's no happy ending where the ends are tied up neatly. There's no structural resolution. I'm not sure what Austin's intention was, but you really get involved with the relationship of the characters. The play is about their struggle. That's so interesting for me, because it's like eavesdropping.
JC: You sure have a lot going on in your life right now. Not many actors working Off-Broadway have their faces plastered on a huge billboard for a TV series right in the middle of the theater district. Is there someone in your life that grounds you, the way Josh grounds Uncle Bob?
GH: Not really. Just working keeps me grounded. Plus, I didn't grow up dreaming of this, so I didn't have any high expectations. That keeps me completely engaged. It's a brand new experience on many different levels.
JC: With your TV success, have old friends and family been coming out of the woodwork to say hi?
GH: (laughing) I did get a very short e-mail from an old friend that just said, "Is that you?"
JC: I noticed on the Queer as Folk website message boards that most of your fans are female. That surprised me a little, considering your character's blatant homosexuality.
GH: I think it's the first time that women have had the chance to see this part of life, unless they're into buying male gay porn! It's very explicit. Men have been watching women make love to each other in magazines and films forever. If you're sexually attracted to men, it stands to reason that you might like to see two men in a sexual situation It's a real baseline dynamic! And it changes the power struggle, because women never got to see that. That's a bizarre sociological result of the show.
JC: What's the future of Queer as Folk?
GH: We've finished the first season and have been picked up for another. We're scheduled to start shooting again in July, although everything is hinging on the possible strike.
JC: How did you get the role of Brian?
GH: I auditioned, just like everyone else!
JC: Tell me about the character.
GH: He's very strong, extremely clear. He was created as a very sexualized, driven, unapologetic, unsentimental person. Since he's a gay man living in present-day America, the potential for being knocked out of his own orbit is really great. He lives his life at a fever pitch and seems like he's always stepping on hot rocks. I knew it would be a great role to play; but I'm learning that, working on episodic TV, you really don't get to evolve. If the character changes too much, it doesn't make a lot of sense to the audience. You have to let things happen slowly, which was difficult for me to conceptualize. Fortunately, Brian is not the type of guy to go through many changes!
JC: Who has inspired you as an actor?
GH: I saw The Play About the Baby, and Marian Seldes was so extremely alive in it. Of course, it's a brilliant role with great lines, but her delivery and timing were out of this world. It's like she's having a love affair with what she's doing on stage. At the time I saw her performance, I was trying to figure out how to deal with my character in Uncle Bob, and how to deal with the character of Uncle Bob. He's very sophisticated and impenetrable; Josh is trying to get through to him but, with his vernacular, speech patterns, and rhythms, Josh seems like a kid banging on a rock with a hammer. When I saw Marian Seldes, she made me realize what it means to be on stage. That feeling of communication is what pulled me from working with two-dimensional visual arts into the world of the theater.
3 Gale Force Wins, Queer as Folk's bad boy, Gale Harold, talks about Sex, Success, and his summer job.
From MetroSource, June/July 2001
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Brian Kinney is an asshole. After watching nearly a full season of Queer As Folk, I've seen enough to know that -- after watching the first episode, I'd seen enough to know that. I was there when he tossed Justin aside time after time. I was there when he reneged on his agreement to let Melanie have custody of Gus. I was there when he ruined Michael's birthday party. And now, he's sitting across the table from me.
Part of me expects him to stare for a moment, roll his eyes, say something deadpan and blow me off, a la Queer as Folk. But I'm quickly aware that it's Gale Harold, not Brian Kinney, with whom I'm talking. And Harold couldn't be any more different than Kinney, the character he plays on Showtime's hit series about a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh. He's friendly, warm and light-hearted, if not a bit haggard due to his hectic schedule.
Since taping for QAF ended in March, Harold has been in New York preparing for his Off-Broadway debut in Austin Pendleton's controversial dark comedy Uncle Bob, which had a month-long run at the SoHo Playhouse in New York, this past May. Harold had his first read-through with co-star George Morfogen, of HBO's OZ, on March 27, and hasn't had much rest since.
That doesn't mean he's not enjoying himself. "It's like sobering up after being on a long, Quaalude hangover," Harold says of being back on stage. "Not to say working on [QAF] isn't amazing -- 'cause it is. But it's a totally different state of mind and feeling."
Harold plays Josh, Uncle Bob's troubled, irresponsible twenty-something nephew who shows up -- uninvited -- at Bob's apartment during the last days of Bob's fight against AIDS. Harold enjoys the role because the character is so different from Brian, a calculating stoic who thrives on manipulation and exploitation. "[Josh] has never had any kind of meaningful relationship on any level with anyone except his uncle, but in a protracted, psychological imagined way, " he says of his character. "Even though he's full of all this energy and this feeling, he's really naive at the same time."
Harold, who began acting late in 1996, is no stranger to theatre. He grew up in Atlanta in the '70s, attended American University and dropped out after one year to study fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute. There, he discovered an interest in acting. "I fucked around with performance art, but I never really broke through in any way or felt like it was happening," he says.
When he moved to Los Angeles in 1997, he delved into it. Before getting the role of Brian Kinney last year, Harold starred in such productions as Me and My Friend at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, The Misanthrope and Cymbeline. In fact, it's the television show, not the stage, that's the new experience.
And getting into television brought its own set of complications for Harold, who is, for the first time, dealing with being a celebrity. Much speculation has arisen around Harold's sexual orientation, especially since he previously avoided the topic in interviews, unlike his co-stars. (Randy Harrison, who plays Justin, and Pater Paige, who plays Emmet, are both openly gay.) But the verdict's in, and he's bound to disappoint Folk watchers everywhere. "I'm straight," Harold says unequivocally. "And the reason that I haven't talked about it is because of the show and the way they were promoting it."
Harold is speaking of the extensive, country-wide ad campaign that began over six months before Folk even aired and which became more intense in the weeks before the show premiered in December. "My idea was to keep everything focused on the characters. I wanted [Brian] to have a chance. And I knew for him to have a chance he would have to be as much that character as completely as possible." So he opted to avoid discussion of his sexual orientation, which he now considers a dicey move, but is happy he did it.
Not only Harold, but everyone involved in QAF, has come under fire from critics and the public for the show's graphic depiction of the lives of gay men and lesbians in modern-day Pittsburgh. One of the harshest reviews came from the LA Times, which summed up the show as "relentless cruising and graphically simulated sex, at the expense of character depth, in an assembly line of orgasms." Ouch.
Harold vehemently disagrees that the show is just about sex. "I don't think that there's any exploitation going on because the characters are complete. They all have relationships, not only with their sexual partners but they have meaningful relationships with friends and family members," he explains. "If you take any slice of society and you go in and close up on it, depending on what day and what time of day, you may zoom in on two people fucking. Or you may zoom in on two people sitting around the table eating dinner."
And many times, QAF does happen to zoom in on two people fucking. And it's hard to deny that those sex scenes aren't graphic. But Harold's biggest concern is not getting naked with another man, but making the scenes look real, both mechanically and emotionally. "But in some of those scenes, there's obviously no emotional content at all," he laughs, "so it doesn't matter."
Playing a gay man -- even a gay man who has explicit sex frequently -- doesn't bother Harold at all. "there are real similarities to playing any other kind of scene," he says of his many steamy on- screen moments. Even when people think he's gay and call him "Brian" off the set, Harold finds the humor in it. He recalls one of the cast's public appearances at a business expo. "There were hundreds of people screaming Brian!" he laughs. "But that doesn't surprise me. I was prepared for that."
All in all, though, Harold shrugs off complaints that the show is too sexual or paints the gay community in a bad light. "I've heard from a lot of people that have said this how has changed their mind for the positive, has opened them to becoming closer and to becoming more understanding [of gays and lesbians]," he says. And for those who are still complaining, "Don't get hung up on the fact that you're watching something that's entertainment, 'cause if you're not being entertained, then turn it off and watch something else."
Regardless of what anyone says (many have praised the show, too), Showtime picked up QAF for a second season. So expect to see Brian, Justin, Michael and the gang back this fall. Filming resumes in July; that is, if the impending writer's union strike is resolved by then. And, unlike Brian Kinney would, Harold lights up at the thought of being reunited with his new friends. "I wasn't expecting this whole new family all of a sudden," he says of his QAF co-stars. "I'm already starting to look forward to going back."
4 Gale Force
By Frank DeCaro for TV Guide, June 16, 2001
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The sexy (and often naked) star of 'Queer as Folk' has come on strong this season-and become an accidental gay icon in the process.
Spending the spring in a Manhattan hotel so hip it hadn't officially opened yet is exactly what fans of 'Queer as Folk' would expect from Brian Kinney. But for Gale Harold, who plays the fashionable sex machine on Showtime's controversial hit about a group of gay nearly-thirtysomethings, this New York sojourn hasn't been one big orgy of sex, shopping and swank.
"It's been slightly frustrating," Harold says, using a word not present in his instantly gratified character's vocabulary. "The city is right there in my face, and I can't enjoy it because I'm so wrapped up in the play." The play is an off-Broadway revival of "Uncle Bob," a 1992 AIDS drama in which Harold is appearing as a sexually confused nephew who barges into the life of his dying, bitterly funny uncle (Oz's George Morfogen).
But Harold isn't complaining too much. He wanted to do a play or a film during his hiatus from Queer as Folk, and as it turns out, he's doing both before returning to Toronto in August to shoot 20 more episodes of the show for next season (the current season runs through June 24).
For the handsome leading man, who looks younger than his 31 years, the past year has been more action packed than the backroom at the show's fictional dance club, Babylon. An unknown actor who began performing only four years ago, Harold has become a hot commodity - and a heartthrob in the gay community - by baring almost all for the cameras as a hedonistic advertising hotshot who humps and bumps his way to gay yuppie nirvana.
The son of fundamentalist Pentecostal churchgoers, Harold is certainly not Brian. But he is just as cocksure, just as mysterious and just as deep. "He's intense, and he likes that people think that about him," says costar Randy Harrison, who plays Brian's underage boyfriend, Justin. "He seems more intense than he really is, though. Gale's sillier and laughs more than Brian does. He's kinder. And I don't think he's quite as manipulative."
Looking as if he just rolled out of bed, wearing an untucked light blue linen shirt, gray pants and sneakers, a cap, sunglasses and several days' worth of stubble hiding his face, Harold arrives at Manhattan's 60 Thompson hotel carrying coffee, a half-eaten bag of blue corn chips, a cell phone and a spiral notebook. Between puffs on American Spirit cigarettes, he explains how landing his role on Queer as Folk came at a point when he'd all but given up on having a television career. "A week and a half before I read for the part, I told my agent, 'Don't send me on any more TV auditions; it's all so trite," he recalls. But that was before he read the pilot sсript for the show that would change his life.
Series executive producers Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen were having trouble casting the role of the sexually predatory Brian Kinney when Harold showed up at the eleventh hour. "We kept pushing back the shooting date, and people were getting tense," remembers Lipman. "But when Mr. Gale Harold walked in, Ron and I looked at each other and absolutely knew," says Lipman. "He had a certain kind of cockiness. But he's very, very charming underneath all that. He has his own direction and agenda. There's no bull---- with him."
"[Gale] does things because he wants to, not because he feels obligated," says Michelle Clunie, who plays lesbian lawyer Melanie Marcus. "If he doesn't feel like showing up someplace, he just won't show up. But on the last day of shooting, he brought flowers for everyone. And when I broke up with my boyfriend and I couldn't quit crying, he just held me. He's a gentle, enigmatic and aloof spirit."
For Harold and the rest of the cast of mostly unknown actors, the hype surrounding the New York premiere of 'Queer as Folk' last November was a watershed moment. "It was overwhelming," says Harold. A sign in Times Square touting the series and bearing a picture of his face the size of a garage door stopped him in his tracks. "When I saw the billboard, it was like, 'Jesus Christ! They really believe in this thing and proved it with the money they poured into promoting it."
"It was a shock to his system," says Harrison. "All of a sudden you're being treated like you're a star." Harold, it seems, has not yet learned how to handle the press, but when he screws up - not showing up for an interview, for instance - he somehow manages to get away with it. "Someone who looks like him, it's hard to be that angry with," jokes Harrison.
Of course, the question many want answered is this: Is Harold as gay as the character he so convincingly plays? When 'Queer as Folk' premiered last fall, he was not discussing the matter. "I didn't have a career when this show started. I had nothing to talk about. I had no interest in discussing my sexual preference," he says. Unlike his fellow cast members, Hal Sparks and Chris Potter, who vehemently asserted their off-screen heterosexuality; or Harrison and Peter Paige, who are gay on the show and in real life, Harold remained mum until now. "I am straight," he maintains, "but if we're talking about 'Queer as Folk,' that's insignificant information."
"When we met him, Brian and Gale just fused," says Lipman. "Gale has such sexuality as a person that it's kind of daunting. How many people could be as open or fluid and bring that to a character? It doesn't have anything to do with being gay or straight." Adds Cowen, "He's breaking new ground for bringing sexuality to a performance, and not just gay sexuality. I don't think any other actor has ever done what he's doing. I think it s kind of historic."
To Harold, the speculation about his sexual orientation, even though he often has a girlfriend and is rumored to be dating Clunie, is nothing new. "When I was in high school, people asked me if I was gay. It's like if you're not slobbering on every woman in sight, you're hiding something," Harold says. That he liked reading William S. Burroughs and Oscar Wilde didn't help.
A decent student - "I wasn't a slouch, but I wasn't a Mensa society member" -Harold remembers his youth in Atlanta as a time of "T-top Trans Ams and rock and roll." A middle child - he has an older sister and a younger brother- Harold excelled at soccer and landed a scholarship at American University in Washington, D.C. After one semester, he relocated to San Francisco and, at the city's Art Institute, studied photography, screen-printing and film. He didn't finish the program there, either. "I got so much in debt that I decided to pull the plug and work," he says.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and, encouraged by a producer friend, took acting classes that led to roles in West Coast stage productions of "Me and My Friend," "The Misanthrope," and "Cymbeline." "I'd always been interested in film, but being an actor had never occurred to me. I never thought I'd be on television." The fact that he landed on such a hot series his first time out, he says, makes him "ridiculously lucky."
Although critically lauded and well rated, 'Queer as Folk' has been the subject of much debate in the gay community. "Some people say it's not real life. That it's over the top and almost fantastical, with an overabundance of fabulous gay circumstances," Harold admits. "But I feel lucky to be on something that people watch and may love or may hate. I wouldn't want to be on a show that was an autopilot default success."
His parents are divided when it comes to the show. "My dad watches - he's supportive," Harold says. "He's not involved in the churches anymore." Harold's mother, still deeply religious, doesn't watch the series. "My mom and I come from completely opposite philosophical perspectives. But she's supportive of me as a human being and an actor." The role of Brian Kinney, however controversial, has opened doors for Harold. "The difference now is that I have access to scripts because I've gotten some exposure," he says. Certainly, it's more exposure than many actors have ever had on television.
5 TV Talkback - Gale Force By Eirik Knutzen for The Toronto Star, October 20, 2001
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Q - Could you please give me some information about the handsome actor Gale Harold, who plays Brian (Kinney) on the Showcase series, Queer As Folk. What other acting has he done, where is he from, and how old is he? - Catherine MacFarlane, Hamilton
A - Gale Harold was born July 10, 1969, Atlanta, Georgia, and raised by God-fearing parents. His mother is considered a lay minister in the Southern Penetecostal Fundamentalist Church. He attended American University in Washington, D.C., on a soccer scholarship to study Romance Literature, but dropped out six months later after a serious dispute with his coach. He went on to study Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, but always made a living restoring MotoGuzzi Italian motorcycles. On the brink of financial disaster in 1997, a producer for Francis Ford Coppola convinced Harold to take his act to the stage. After acting studies in L.A., he joined the off-Broadway production of "Uncle Bob" and squeezed in a TV commercial for the Pontiac Aztek. By several accounts, he is dating Michelle Clunie - who portrays Melanie, the sexy lesbian, on Queer.
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6 Gale Force. Gale Harold is the raciest man on television in Queer as Folk, offscreen he's just a super sexy heterosexual
By Karen Robinovitz for Flaunt Magazine, February 2002--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As alter ego Brian Kinney, he's gotten head in a nightclub, devirginized a 17-year-old boy, and shoved his tongue down dozens of men's throats - just another day at the office for Queer as Folk's Gale Harold.
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Gale Harold is afraid to out himself...as a straight man. The impossibly gorgeous 31-year-old plays Brian Kinney, a smokin' hot sex fiend who beds five men a week on Showtime's anal-positive, gay sitcom Queer as Folk. Since the show began, Harold has given millions of hungry gay men (and women) a delicious taste of his naked body—we've seen scrotum and cotton-candy lips. He's gotten head in a nightclub, devirginized a sweet 17-year-old boy, and shoved his tongue down dozens of men's throats—some of the most graphic guy-on-guy action ever seen on TV (Shaving Ryan's Privates not included).
So the first real question I ask the rising star, when we met on a brisk afternoon at a quaint wine bar in the West Village, was, appropriately, "Gay or straight?" He takes a bite of his goat cheese panini and points to my tape recorder, motioning for me to shut it off. We sit in silence. He turns his head away, rests his square-toed brown boots on the window ledge, and contemplates.
"I can't figure out what to do with this question. Most of the gay men I work with assume I'm straight, so..." More silence. He sips his merlot and eventually continues. "It's funny. No, it's just...trying to answer this question is hilarious." "But you didn't answer," I probe. More silence. "I'm straight. I'm begrudgingly revealing it. I guess it's just that I was thinking which publication should I reveal this to," he finally admits, as if being straight is a crime. He's also single.
Harold's a total guy's guy. He's wearing black Levi's, a knit-wool hat with a cobra snake patch, a black V-neck sweater, a leather cuff bracelet, and a fierce tattoo on the inside of his middle right finger that reads "Resist." He won't discuss the marking. "Don't talk about that."
Harold does, however, talk lovingly about his pickup truck (“I can finally afford to pay for it," he says). Before his big break on cable, he spent three years doing odd jobs, construction work and carpentry in Los Angeles. He went to American University for a year-and-a-half on a soccer scholarship. He's obsessed with Italian motorcycles. And maybe it's the bong hit he confessed to doing before our interview or his Southern upbringing—he's a good ol' Atlanta boy—but he has a mellow, refreshingly laid-back quality that reminds me of Matthew McConaughey.
He puffs on an American Spirit as he speculates, upon my urging, the difference between kissing men and kissing women: "Kissing a man...it's more animalistic. There's a primal drive with men and you can feel that the second you start kissing. It's much more visceral than kissing a woman. Women take their time. There's more play. It's not a mad dash to get your rocks off. And kissing men has made me appreciate kissing women more. I have kissed men who, even after they just shaved, have the roughest skin. I've gotten the worst fuckin' burns on my face."
While most straight men would probably go on about how it's difficult to make out with guy after guy after guy, even for the sake of their art, Harold is very "whatever" about the whole thing. "For a while, the gay thing seemed like such a big deal. But now, I don't think it is. It's just a comedy-drama about people who live in the United States. It's a slice-of-life. I play a character—that's it. But I was well aware of gay lifestyle before the show. I've been hit on in a really strong way by gay men who've tried to convert me, and a lot of my heroes are gay. William Burroughs. Lou Reed. Well, I guess Lou Reed is bi. The point is, it's 2002, gay life is no longer that shocking."
But some of the things television's new boy toy witnesses on the set are rather—um—shocking. "The shit that goes on! I could be walking by the set, eating a doughnut, and there's 30 gay men rolling around. It's actually hysterical," he says, adding that he doesn't mind being objectified for the camera. (In one scene, Harold slowly strips off his clothes, pours water on his head, and asks a strapping young lad if he's coming or going...or coming and then going...or coming and staying.)
"I think it's good that men are being objectified because since forever women have been objectified. We're flipping the coin because things have been lopsided on TV and film for so long. Another good point to the show is that it portrays men's sensuality. They're not just all about sex and only sex," he philosophizes.
He's right. The show isn't only about sex. It's also about—well—oral sex, which makes us happy as folk.
7 Gale Force. Still here, Still queer (as Folk)
Queer as Folk's Feisty Gale Harold takes aim against homophobia, fame, and critics and his character, Brian
By Michael Rowe for The Advocate, February 05, 2002
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The tall, slender man locking his bicycle outside an unpretentious Toronto restaurant is wearing a fedora tilted down over his eyes in a way that suggests a desire for great distance, as though a veil of invioability has been drawn about him like an invisible cloak. One someone else, the hat might be a bohimian affectation. For 32-year-old actor Gale Harold, it's a practical strategy. Anonymity--or inviolability, for that matter--has become a rare commodity in the 13 months since his character, Brian Kinney, the gay white shark of Showtime's Queer as Folk, seared himself into gay consciousness and pop culture.
If Harold could mark off more private territory—for instance, never do another celebrity profile—he would. Questions about what it's like to be a straight man playing gay or what it feels like to be so handsome exasperate him beyond distraction. He doesn't like fame or trust its motivation.
I'm grateful for the attention," he says of his fans' devotion, "because it validates that I'm doing something." But even as he says this, Harold points out that it sounds like something hundreds of overexposed celebrities have already said. As he talks, reaching past the conventions of celebrityspeak for something truer, you begin to realize that if you thought this man was just some diva of the month, you could not be more wrong.
"Gale has very strong opinions, and he's very political," says Queer as Folk executive producer Ron Cowen, with no small measure of pride. "Sometimes I think he's the smartest person I've ever met. I know a lot of smart, well-educated, well-read people. But there's something about Gale where it takes a leap from education or keen intelligence to some other place. Genius is a cheap word, especially in Hollywood. But he's really smart."
Inside the restaurant, the waiter has brought him a cup of tea, and we have ordered lunch. "How could I not be ambivalent?" Harold says, talking about his new fame. (He'll reluctantly, and with some humor, accede to being a "semi-junior league star.") "If being famous means that you get to work on great projects all the time, with great people, then my idea of fame may include that. But," he says with distaste, "it doesn't necessarily includefame."
Harold acknowledges that television culture creates a spurious intimacy. "There's a genuine human impulse to want to know more about people you're interested in, for whatever reason," he says. "But that impulse has been manipulated as an industry—-a bad industly--to sustain itself. It can be tweaked by publicists and studios. It didn't develop as a benevolent machine to provide more pleasure to people. It developed as a tool to sustain itself."
Nevertheless, the story of Harold's casting in Queer as Folk has that Hollywood-miracle aura that publicists love. Executive producers Cowen and Daniel Lipman, the Emmy-award winning writers of the groundbreaking AIDS drama An Early Frost and the long-running drama series Sisters, had acquired the American rights to the British drama series Queer as Folk. They had already cast actors Scott Lowell, Peter Paige, Hal Sparks, and Randy Harrison as a group of gay friends whose intertwined lives would form the basis for the American version of the story. The casting had been nightmarish for Lipman and Cowen because agents wouldn't send their clients in to read for the parts in the show. The part of Brian Kinney was particularly difficult.
"Here's a gay man, very sexual, very masculine, not the kind of gay character people are used to seeing," says Lipman. "If he were a straight male character fucking every woman in sight, he'd be a hero. So this was not like the other roles, and that was part of the difficulty."
"It was an extremely distressing experience trying to cast Brian, because of what we discovered to be the massive amount of homophobia [in Hollywood]," says Cowen. "We were so shocked and so upset, because we went into this thinking that in the years since An Early Frost things had changed. What we had discovered was that things hadn't changed one iota."
Late on a Friday afternoon, with an 8:30 A.M. Monday meeting scheduled to introduce their cast to the Showtime executives, Lipman and Cowen still didn't have their Brian Kinney.
"It was a test of faith, and by Friday at 5 P.M. faith was running out," Lipman says ruefully. At 5:45 P.M., their casting director called. "She said, 'Come on over right now, he's here!' " Lipman recalls. "In walks Gale Harold, and we're looking at him and he's reading the scene, and Ron and I are looking at each other, and it's like, Is he fucking fabulous?"
"He fell out of the sky," Cowen breathes. "There's truly no other explanation."
Lipman asked Harold to be at the Showtime offices in Los Angeles at 8 A.M. on Monday. "He lit up a cigarette, and, very Brianesque, he said, I'm with this repertory company, and we have to strike a set on Sunday night, and I don't think I can make it.' And we're thinking, Is he for real? Who says that? We've been in Hollywood too long. What do you say to that?" Lipman laughs, shaking his head in disbelief. He pressed a copy of the sсript into Harold's arms and asked him to read it and call them at home the next day.
"I was standing in the kitchen," Cowen remembers, "and the phone rang and a voice said, 'Hi, this is Brian Kinney.' "
"What helped me recover," says Cowen, describing the aftermath of the casting experience that clearly devastated him both as a filmmaker and as a gay man, "was that Gale was brave enough to take the part. It was the same way with Aidan Quinn [who was one of the few actors willing to consider An Early Frost, in which he starred as a gay man with AIDS]. You need the one actor who is not afraid and who is very politically committed to what he's doing. In a way, that was the emotional salvation."
Harold, it seems, has always been asking questions. He was raised in the Atlanta suburbs by an engineer father and a mother who sold real estate. His parents were devout Pentecostals, and his childhood was a classic Southern melange of church, school, and sports. "There were so many little things about my childhood that were Southern," he says, "and so many that were suburban American. There was a dairy farm behind my house at one point."
Harold manifested an early affinity for soccer, which he calls "a beautiful game." As he moved toward adolescence, however, he began to be concerned about the culture that went along with the game.
"I burned out very rapidly on what you refer to as 'jocks,'" he says. "I couldn't really handle that state of mind. I don't know what it's like to be a girl in team sports, but definitely for a guy in the States, there are so many flag-waving impulses forced upon you. Excellence in sports is a good way to keep you moving in the direction of allegiance to your school and your country."
Although he didn't have the terminology at the time, young Gale observed the homophobia woven into the fabric of his suburban world, both on the playing fields of Southwest DeKalb High School and in his parents' church. He is careful not to dwell on the subject of religion out of respect for his mother, who is still Pentecostal. (His father left the church several years ago).
"I started to lose all interest [in religion] at around 15, around the time I got my driver's licenser Harold remembers. "I knew it was bullshit, you know? The choir director was gay. The assistant choir director was gay. Most of the men in the choir were gay. It was obvious. And these were people I talked to and grew up knowing. These were my friends, and my parents' friends, and members of the church. And they're up there singing and clapping their hands, then they sit down and some ogre walks up and starts saying something that is basically potentially fatal under the right circumstances. And we know how fast those circumstances can shift and become dangerous.
"I think [today] it's probably gotten easier and easier for people to deal with," he muses, "but it's still a monumental achievement for some people to say, Tou're gay, can we talk?' They're so scared, because they don't know what it means about them, about God. I would not want to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, even now."
Likewise on the playing field, where Harold was once forbidden to play soccer because his hair was too long. The explanation was that it made him look unmasculine. Furthermore, "because he took my side, our goalkeeper wasn't allowed to play either." Harold sighs. "When you're a kid you instinctively know when someone's blowing smoke up your ass. You react to it, or you don't."
Atlanta, even then, was a culturally mixed city. The best record stores were in gay neighborhoods, and Harold and his close friends would often find themselves rifling through the stacks. "You look up and realize, Oh, this is the deal," he shrugs, recalling his nascent awareness of a larger gay presence.
Closer to home he had friends he says he knew were gay. But it wasn't discussed. "Say I'm 15 years old," he suggests, remembering. "And I know you're gay. And you know I know. We never actually talk about it because you never bring it up, and I don't feel like invading whatever that might be. We're not going to feel compelled to go there. I never had one of those moments when someone came out to me as a confidant," he says. "The acknowledgment was already strong enough. It wasn't like they needed me to tell them that I knew."
After high school, Harold won a soccer scholarship to American University, but he dropped out after a year and moved to San Francisco, studying fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. He supported himself with a series of low-paying jobs tailor-made for a young man searching.
"I was waiting tables, taking out the trash, painting houses. A bunch of menial shit,"he says cheerfully. As time passed, though, he got restless: "I wasn't looking [for a direction], and life had started getting beyond the point of enjoyment, you know?" When a friend asked him to appear in a movie (which, in the end, was never made), Harold's interest was piqued.
With the dot-coms booming, San Francisco was becoming too pricey. When the building where he lived was sold and turned into a parking garage, Harold took it as an omen. "I knew at some point I was going to have to do something," Harold says. He left for Los Angeles in 1997. "I'd met an acting teacher there I was intrigued by, and I took a weeklong workshop," he recalls.
The craft of acting struck Harold in a way that two-dimensional media didn't. Waiting tables to support himself, he studied, he says, "to the exclusion of everything else, for a solid year and a half." A manager who'd seen him in a play signed him. For a year, Harold made the actor's boot camp round of auditions. Nothing clicked. At one point he asked his manager to stop sending him out for television work, sure that there was nothing for him in that medium. Then, of course, came Brian.
By the time we head over to the QAF production office to continue our conversation, Harold is ready to talk about his controversial on-screen character. "There was an attraction," he concedes, when asked if the chance to play a sexual hunter-gatherer like Brian Kinney--as far from the "gay upstairs neighbor" as possible—appealed to him. "Another attraction was that it was an interesting story. It wasn't West Hollywood, 90210, which I would never have been called in for. I'm not that 'type.'"
Harold's initial take was that the character would best be played as "a cross between Lou Reed and Oscar Wilde, with a gold tooth, and go completely over the top with it. Now we know that I can't do that," he says mischievously, "though I still think that's how it should be done. It would be a lot dirtier. But he's not allowed to be that." Nor does he buy into the notion that Brian is a pure predator. "You have to like your character, because if you don't, no one else will either. And if the point of the show is to create a character that nobody likes and everybody hates, that would be the way to go. Make him a predator. But I liked Stuart [the character on whom Brian is based]! I liked the guy."
The thought that he might be type-cast playing a gay man never occurred to him when he considered whether or not to take the role. He had asked a gay actor friend whether he should accept the part, not because of Brian's sexual orientation but because of the show's merit. "If you want to be an actor," his friend told him, "then act. "
"There was the creative impulse and the chance to do something," Harold says honestly, "but there was also $1,400 worth of parking tickets and back registration on my truck." As he owed money to friends and back rent to landlords, the pragmatist in Harold knew It was time to grow up. I'd been through the 'hangdog barely making if thing over and over again. Your options run out." Looking back, he says, he realizes that "the only difference between me now and me then, aside from the experience I've gained working on the show, is that I have money. That I'm able to support myself and pay off my student loans. And the ability to make things right with people over time. That becomes a really important thing as you turn 30."
This brings up one of those boilerplate questions Harold dislikes: Is he at all worried that his role in Queer as Folk might negatively affect his professional future? His answer is swift.
"If someone doesn't want to work with me because I'm playing a gay character, I don't want to work with them," he says calmly. "They can fuck off."
Even that succinct statement is more than Harold made to the press when Queer as Folk began. As speculation swirled about which of the actors were actually queer folk, Peter Paige and Randy Harrison identified as gay, Scott Lowell talked about his wife, and Hal Sparks discussed his instinctive discomfort during man-on-man sex scenes.
Gale Harold said ...nothing. Friends still fax him items pulled off the Net, comments that he allegedly made in interviews, "basically putting me in line with other heterosexual actors and their comments." But Harold continues as he started. He doesn't want to make what he calls "pretentious" comments on gay life, heterosexual life, or his own love life.
"Gale is totally cool and secure enough not to be threatened by anything," adds Ron Cowen. "He knows who he is. That makes him more than an actor; it makes him a very fine human being."
Another question that comes up constantly involves the nudity and the sex with other men. But the question people never manage to ask, though they want to, is "How on earth do you manage it?"—the implication being "Doesn't it disgust you as a straight man?" Rather than addressing that homophobic question, the man who rocked Middle America in the first episode of Queer as Folk (when his character boldly instructed Randy Harrison's character on rimming) is matter-of-fact about the mechanics of on-screen sex.
"We have a really good crew," he says casually. "Between the actors and the cooperation of the producers, we've been able to establish a protocol for the show, where every sex scene has a 'sex meeting.' The director has a shot list of what he wants. It not only demystifies it, but it's like a rehearsal for scenes that aren't rehearsed. If you know what you're going to do and why, when you're actually there doing it, you can. You're not thinking, What the fuck is going on? Where's the camera? Why are we rotting again? Why am I doing this again? You don't have to deal with it. You understand the scene."
Harold is amused by the responses he gets in public. Heterosexual women beg him to tell them he's straight. As for heterosexual men, he says, "The responses range from 'My wife loves the show!' to 1 loved the show; it's funny as hell!' " Gay men love or loathe Brian Kinney, and Harold sometimes gets the runoff. Example? At a Toronto Film Festival party, he heard an expletive fired his way as he passed a group of men he didn't know. "But you can't even acknowledge that as a negative response, really," Harold says philosophically.
His family, for their part, seem to have taken his newfound high profile and growing fame in stride. "Some of them were shocked," Harold muses, "just by the fact that I had a job. I just let the information come out [bit by bit], so that by the time they actually realized I was on a television show with a budget and that I was getting paid and flying first class in airplanes, they were, like, 'Jesus, that's beyond anything we've ever considered.' "
The key to understanding Gale Harold is likely not going to be found in this interview, or in any of the other interviews he's sat for since he became "Brian on Queer as Folk It might instead be found by examining where he went while on summer hiatus, before the new season began shooting.
Instead of heading off to Los Angeles to capitalize on his Brian Kinney status, Harold packed up and headed to the tiny SoHo Playhouse in New York to appear with George Morfogen in a low-budget production of Austin Pendleton's AIDS drama, Uncle Bob. The stage was his first love, and he had arranged a summer tryst.
His personal publicity from Queer as Folk followed him to New York as he tried to prepare for his stage role. "It was very distracting," he says. "It was a blessing and curse. I wish it had just been the director and I."
Has he ever woken up and asked himself what he thought he was doing when he took on a role as potentially defining as Brian Kinney? "I haven't, no," he answers. "I've woken up after seeing this," he adds, brandishing a page from a high-fashion magazine featuring him sulking elegantly for the camera, "and asked myself what I thought I was doing. Or seeing my cover for MetroSource, which was such a cheese dish, and said 'What the fuck am I doing? I'm supposed to be working on a play!'"
A publicist knocks on the door to see how the interview is going thus far. Harold smiles with genuine courtesy, but at that moment, it's clear there's one place he wants to be--back at work on the set, acting. He's right: Interviews can be an enormous cheese dish.
"If anyone can crack the publicity nut and figure out how to not come across hammy and contrived," he says, sighing, "I'd love to talk to them."
8. FULL FORCE GALE By P.J. Reno for IN MAGAZINE LA 20-Jun 2004
Best known for his role as gaylothario-slash-horn-dog Brian Kinney on Showtime’s Queer As Folk, actor Gale Harold’s upcoming feature Wake isn’t exactly what people may expect. Instead of playing the cool heartbreaker among a world of caring friends, Harold jumps into the role of Kyle Riven, a mental patient who comes home to visit his ailing mother. Things get complicated when his brother Sebastian asks him for medication to help euthanize their mother, and his violent, on-the-lam brother Ray shows up with their fourth brother, Jack, and two strippers. What starts off as a perverse family reunion brings out brotherly secrets, repressed anger, madness, and ultimately death. Not exactly a night of laughs and sex at Babylon, the night club on Queer As Folk. Why would Harold be drawn to something like Wake?
“To be frank, a lot of what attracted me to the film was the fact that my friends were making it,” he admitted, noting that his friend Henry LeRoy “Roy” Finch was writing and directing, and his producing partner/wife Susan-Landau Finch had put the project together. It turned out that Wake was a jumping- off point for all of them.
“It was my first lead role in a feature film, and it was Roy’s first feature directing, so that’s something I’ll never experience again like that, just jumping off and going for it,” Harold explained. “Furthermore, Roy had really ambitious and personal ideas about how he wanted to direct the film and how he wanted to structure it. And one of the beautiful things about doing something for the first time is you don’t have that fear of ‘Well, this is a complicated or oblique or abstract way of trying to work.’ You just want to do it. And you had the further excitement of not really having any money.”
The film, shot entirely on location in Bath, Maine, in a house originally built in 1745, was a friend and family affair. Landau-Finch’s Oscar-winning father, Martin Landau, appears in a cameo role, and the shoestring production forced everyone to get into the spirit of the alternative and eclectic nature of the film.
For Harold, the freeform spirit of the shoot helped him understand the character of Kyle, who ends up taking the medication slated for his sick mother. “He starts off in one very kind of sedate specific place,” Harold said, “which is maintaining a state of mind, trying to deal with chemical problems, and he seems to have it under control, and that very rapidly deteriorates to a place of being totally out of control. The question then is, ‘Will he be able to survive going there and coming back?’ So it was a lot to play, a lot of distance to cover. He wasn’t just observing the action, he was in the very center of the action.”
After three seasons on Queer As Folk, it was easy for Harold to see the difference between shooting a series and working on a film like Wake For an actor, the differences between the experience of working as a series regular on a TV show and starring in an independent feature couldn’t be more distinct.
“It’s always the writer’s genesis, but in something like Wake the characters kind of get born, live, and die while you’re making the movie,” he explained. “To some degree, in the television world, the characters are wrapped up before you ever meet them in a way, and you’re at the mercy of that process. And to be fair, you can’t have every actor on a television show kind of trying to make it up as they go along because it will never get done. But there is something to be said once the cameras get turned on and you’re in the room, and you really want to give a twist or give a deeper color to what is there, and you’re just told ‘That’s just not what we really want.’ And that’s a hard thing to hear, but you have to make those kinds of concessions. Luckily for me I’ve had the opportunity to do both—be in a very rigorous, controlled, environment that pays well, and work on a lot more challenging, frightening, seat-ofyour- pants things basically done for the thrill of it.”
Snagging a television role is a great gig for any actor, but there can often be a price to pay if you get stereotyped, offered roles that are a variation of what already has been done. Harold, however, doesn’t see himself falling into that trap, thanks to Brian’s unique place in television.
“One thing that can be said about it, there are not a lot of characters really like him,” Harold said of Brian. “Since I’ve been working on Queer As Folk, most of the work I’ve done has been quite different. He’s so specific that almost anyone next to him would have an easily identifiable difference or makeup.”
Harold, who was born and raised in Georgia, went to American University in Washington, D.C., and studied finearts at the San Francisco Art Institute, is now part of a film where he’s one of the draws. Now a recognizable face thanks to Queer As Folk, Harold gets noticed. It also means he has to deal with fans and media that are interested in engaging with him about his career. While that may be a fun perk for actors looking for attention, Harold sees it as a potential challenge if he lets it get in the way of his work.
“Later on, hopefully if I have a career that lasts, if I have a chance to do a lot more different things to flesh out my work, I think it will be easier for me,” he said. “I’m kind of trying to run from the calcification of being told you’re doing a good job all the time, because you sort of start to lean back on that. Or you just become too comfortable. It’s potentially damaging. That’s not really what it’s about. That kind of notoriety is outsized by what will help you grow, or keep you aware of what will allow you to be an actor or be in touch. It’s not that big of a deal or a nightmare or anything, but it can be an obstacle. And I’m not Brian Kinney. That’s an important thing, too. He exists on television. How they respond to him good or bad, that’s him. I can’t do anything about that.”
Sooner rather than later, Queer As Folk will come to an end, and Harold hopes he will be moving on to other roles. Now that the thrill of his first feature is behind him, The question is, where will Harold be in five years in terms of his acting?
“I want to be five years ahead of where I am now,” Harold explained. “I don’t mean that to be trite; I want to keep developing. I want to become relaxed in my own work and go deeper. Just growing and studying and trying new things and hopefully having professional access to work that’s good and interesting. I don’t want to be on the treadmill of artificiality.”
9. GALE'S FORCE - From the Showtime site. RedZone. 08.05.2003
Hot as ever on QUEER AS FOLK, Gale Harold diversifies his resume
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@темы: статьи, Гейл Харольд, Gale Force
