On Being Brave: Straight Actors Playing Gays and Other Weirdos and Creeps
Digital Photocollage | White Lotus Set | 2026
In 1981, an adult film called Brothers Should Do It starred JW King and John King as brothers. They were not related. The fiction of brotherhood was the permission structure — the thing that made the intimacy legible, containable, not quite gay. The industry has always been good at loopholes.
Forty-four years later, The White Lotus Season 3 ran the same play in prestige television. Brothers Saxon and Lochlan Ratliff — played by Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola, who are not related — kissed on camera, got high, and participated in a threesome.
The internet called it shocking.
Some viewers called it disgusting.
The actors called it complicated.
The audience called it unmissable.
Season 3 averaged 16 million viewers globally per episode. Season 4 was already greenlit before Season 3 aired its first frame.
Sam Nivola, speaking to Variety, described what it was actually like: “It was very weird kissing Patrick because he’s a really good friend of mine. And, you know, I’m straight, he’s straight. It’s already weird. It would have been easier if that was the first time we were meeting.”
Already weird. Before the cameras rolled. Before the scene was shot. The weirdness was not about the acting. It was about proximity — to another man’s mouth, to gay desire, to something that does not resolve cleanly into the straight world both actors occupy. The other woman in the scene, Charlotte Le Bon, was easier to work with, Nivola explained, because they had just met. No stakes. With Patrick it felt, he said, “sort of fucked up.”
This is the texture of straight male discomfort with gay intimacy, spoken plainly and without apparent self-awareness. The weirdness is not about craft. It is not about character. It is about what gay desire does to a straight man’s sense of himself when he gets too close to it.
Hollywood has long called this bravery.
Tom Hanks won an Academy Award for playing a gay man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia and has since said he would not take that role today. Jake Gyllenhaal, reflecting on Brokeback Mountain, described playing gay alongside Heath Ledger as medicine — important precisely because both men were straight, because their willingness to do it broke the stigma. The stigma, in this formulation, belongs to the role. The brave thing is to touch it anyway.
The out gay actor Wentworth Miller had a different read. Straight actors playing gay, he said, centers straightness. It doesn’t matter that they’re acting. You still know what you’re looking at.
What you are looking at, most of the time, is a straight man performing his tolerance of gay life as a dramatic exercise — and being rewarded handsomely for it. The Academy has always loved a straight actor willing to go there. The word brave appears in nearly every profile.
The brotherhood loophole is worth examining. From the adult film industry to prestige HBO drama, the fiction of brothers has long served as a container for male intimacy that cannot otherwise be named. It is gay desire routed through a structure the straight world already understands — family loyalty, masculine bonding, the intensity of men who share blood. The queerness is present. It is simply housed somewhere the audience can manage it.
These six collages look directly at the discomfort straight actors describe and find something else there entirely — the ordinary human experience of desire, contact, proximity, wanting. One collage takes its central image from the famous switched bathing suits scene in The White Lotus itself. Other collages draw from the show’s own footage, accented with the blood red and harvest gold moons of the series vocabulary. Marlon Brando makes a much appreciated guest appearance under a billowing American flag. Lastly, a collage places Patrick Schwarzenegger front and center in his striped shirt, the harvest gold moon large behind him, Jupiter 3 in the foreground, and Lochlan rendered as a miniature figure clinging to his chest — a study in scale, proportion, and the strange gravity that pulls these two men toward each other throughout the season.
Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola are not brothers. They are two straight men who kissed on camera and called it weird. Somewhere in that footage, if you look past the discomfort, is the thing The Closet Series has been documenting all along.
It was always there. It was never the problem.
Jupiter 3 is left wondering if it is equally brave for gay actors to play straight roles.
— Behan
Citations:
Sam Nivola, Variety, 2025.
Season 3 viewership figures, Variety and Deadline, April 2025.
