Jason Ritter stars as Otis, a conflicted young man who doesn’t want to disappoint his father (played by Tom Arnold) so instead of admitting he’s gay, he tries to play it straight.
Jason Ritter’s Take on His Character Coming Out of the Closet: “I think as far as I’ve been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with and things like that is that it almost seems like Russian Roulette when you’re coming out of the closet to your parents. I’ve heard stories of parents that these kids were the most afraid of telling being totally okay with it and embracing them and working through it. And then the parents who were ‘Oh, we love you unconditionally’ going, ‘Get out of my house.’ It’s that kind of thing where you don’t know how your parents are going to react. As much as you love them, as much as you think they love you, there are some people who it’s okay for others - they’re tolerant of other people - but once it’s something in their family, it’s a different thing.
I think that Otis loves his father and he needs his father. His mother died and he’s naïve. I’m scared. He’s realizing this thing about himself but he doesn’t even want to risk his relationship with his father. I didn’t really talk to Don [Roos] about this, but I feel like at the beginning of the movie, Otis had almost said to himself, ‘Okay, I guess I won’t be with anyone. If me being with a guy would hurt my dad and make him hate me, I won’t be with anyone.’ He’s just at this place where he’s stuck and the lie has created this rift between them and he doesn’t know what to do about that, and so keeps his dad away because if his dad looks too close, he’ll see.”
On Working with Writer/Director Don Roos: “He’s amazing. I think one of the things that separates him from other directors is he really respects actors and he really feels like actors have something to bring to the table. Other directors I feel like sometimes [view] actors as kind of these annoying creatures that don’t do what you want them to do and you’ve just got to deal with them in order to get the movie made.
[Roos] said that his directing is 90% casting. And so he said that once he saw what we were bringing, he said he just let us do our own thing. And as far as he wrote and directed this, I’ve never seen anyone be so loose. …He orchestrated everything, but he would listen to us. If we said something and it didn’t fit into his vision, he would tell us no. But he would really listen. He wouldn’t just kind of be patronizing and go, ‘Yeah, sure, that’s great but I still think we’re going to do it this way.’ He’d be like, ‘No, I don't think that’s right because of this.’ Or, ‘Oh, I like that. I didn’t think of that. Let’s try it that way.’”
On Sticking to the Script: “Luckily, he had written it so well that you wouldn’t even want to improvise during [your] scenes because everything was there.”
Jason Ritter on Upcoming Projects: “I’m going to go to New York and do a play at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in the Lincoln Center. It’s a new Wendy Wasserstein play. Dianne Wiest and Charles Durning and Gaby Hoffman and Amy Aquino are going to be in it. Dan Sullivan’s directing and it’s a really exciting, really funny, fun play. Dianne Wiest is this very liberal professor at this small college in New England. I come in and I’m very conservative.”
