The bar at Fanny’s, the bygone-era-themed restaurant nestled inside Los Angeles’s new Academy Museum, features a menu of 10 specialty cocktails, each named after a 2022 best-picture Oscar nominee. Luke Macfarlane is about to order a bourbon-based The Power of the Dog. He makes some swift, nervous jokes about me including this detail in this story; it’s almost too on the nose, he suggests. I order my own Power of the Dog, and he laughs: “Alright, you’re allowed to write about it.”

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How could I not? Here sits Macfarlane, an openly gay actor selecting the menu’s resident gay-movie drink, as he settles in for a long interview about his groundbreaking gay Hollywood movie, Bros, which both pokes light fun at The Power of the Dog—and other prestige queer Westerns starring straight actors, including Brokeback Mountain—and marks the moment he’s been waiting for his whole career: to lead a Hollywood movie.

Such ambitions are hardly surprising; Macfarlane oozes leading-man energy. As we ambled around Wilshire Boulevard’s Museum Row before settling on Fanny’s, he proved instantly, ridiculously charming, introducing himself in a baseball cap and navy T-shirt, offering a firm handshake and gracious conversation. How was he so calm, so centered? The expectations are massive around both Bros—the first gay rom-com distributed by a major studio—and Macfarlane, who’s been consistently around but never made it as big as he’d expected or hoped. You wouldn’t think this was a guy hurtling toward a pivotal turning point in his profession, and maybe his life.

But Macfarlane has learned to roll with the show-business punches, to carry both breakthroughs and disappointments on his very muscular back. He’s lived a true working-actor’s life. He attended Juilliard, training in the same class as Jessica Chastain. After graduating in 2003, he did some theater, then led a buzzy if short-lived Steven Bochco war-drama series for FX called Over There. (“I thought I was going to be a big star. Then it got canceled while I was doing press in Argentina.”) A recurring gig on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters evolved into a regular role, but work dried up after the series concluded. He bulked up to change his appeal, and drew Hallmark’s attention, eventually enlisting in its Christmastime brigade and starring in more than a dozen of its movies. And now, thanks to years of persistence, a chance audition, and a trailblazing casting mandate—oh, and that star quality so few truly possess—he’s in Bros. Quite a trajectory.

“I had this feeling when Luke walked in, and then when he auditioned, of, ‘Why isn’t this guy a mega movie star?’” Bros director Nicholas Stoller, known for helming comedy hits like Neighbors and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, tells me. “I didn’t understand how I didn’t know who this person was until that moment. It didn’t make any sense.”

Macfarlane grew up in a small town in Ontario, Canada, and developed two loves: acting and science. His Bros character, Aaron, an estate lawyer whose hidden artistic side is brought out by an intense new love interest (played by Billy Eichner), represents something of a path not taken (specifically “The University of Toronto applied-sciences program”). “So much of a theater education is your truth, and your vulnerability is your superpower,” Macfarlane says. “I really felt open to what they had to teach me. As a kid in a small town, your idea of an actor is Inside the Actor’s Studio—like, people are going to be really interested in your take on Hamlet. Then you realize, oh no, you actually have to make a living.”

Michael Urie, another Juilliard classmate known for stealing scenes in Ugly Betty and Younger, remembers his old friend as a dedicated student. “Luke would always get The New York Times on Tuesday for the science page,” he says. “He’d get as excited about dissecting a scene in Richard III as a new black hole that he read about in the Science Times. He’s an endlessly curious guy.”

Macfarlane loved learning about acting; he loved rehearsing and playing with different kinds of performers. For his first movie role, a bit part on Bill Condon’s Kinsey, he explored the basics of working on a set with the Oscar-winning filmmaker. It got clinical, and a little tense, but Macfarlane still tells the story with a huge smile on his face. “I remember Bill kept on telling me, ‘Don’t look at your mark!’ It was my first time on a movie set, and at first I was like, ‘Oh, sorry!’” Macfarlane says. “I could tell he was so frustrated with me. But you learn.”

He shared an infectious enthusiasm with his peers; Urie says that “everybody was completely in love with him.” When Macfarlane had the chance to shine, that sentiment extended to viewers too. See: Brothers & Sisters. Playing Scotty, the quippy and kind-hearted partner to Matthew Rhys’s buttoned-up Kevin Walker, Macfarlane became an immediate fan-favorite—just one reason for his quick promotion to main-cast status.

Scotty and Kevin’s televised wedding was seismic for network TV in 2008. This was the year Proposition 8 passed in California, banning same-sex marriage, and in the thick of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era. Macfarlane felt that weight personally. “My father had passed away, and all the sort of ‘what’s important’ life stuff was happening,” he tells me. “Having gone through press junkets on shows where I’d never mentioned I was gay—not that I was lying, it was nobody’s business—I was like, I’ve got to say something.” He came out to his local paper, The Globe and Mail, that year. “Numerically, it’s not that long ago, but as we all know, culturally, that’s a lifetime ago,” Eichner tells me. “Luke didn’t come out to sell a book. He didn’t come out to get on the cover of People magazine. He didn’t come out to give his career a burst of relevance, the way other actors do. It was very rare for the time.”

Macfarlane conceded to The Globe and Mail that he felt terrified about the potential impact of being out. The dearth of queer A-listers at the time certainly justified that fear. Macfarlane had dreams, a vision. After Brothers & Sisters ended in 2011, he worked out a ton, bulking up to look and feel a world away from Scotty, to enter into a new chapter with confidence. He wanted to do action movies like G.I. Joe and Marvel blockbusters—or hey, maybe play a TV superhero on The CW’s Smallville. He didn’t. “I can literally remember an agent once saying to me, ‘Superman can’t be gay’—like just straight out,” Macfarlane says.

He’ll never know exactly what jobs he didn’t get because of his sexuality. He doesn’t want to sound ungrateful, or bitter; he’s worked steadily and learned lessons with every setback. I press him on this a little bit, though—it had to have been frustrating, right? He nods. “I do remember being frustrated, seeing other actors and straight guys my age—and I never want to make it about that, but—thinking, Why are they getting [the parts]? Why am I not getting them?” he says. “The post–Brothers & Sisters moment was scary, for sure. I was like, ‘Dude, I’m the perfect age for this stuff.’ And it wasn’t clicking, for whatever reason.”

Eichner puts it more bluntly: “No one calls you and says, ‘We found out you’re gay so we’re not casting you.’ But my gut feeling is that he didn’t get nearly the amount of opportunities that he should have and that he deserved [what] a straight actor with his look and his qualifications and his training and his exposure was getting at the time.”

“Are you asking if I’m ever going to do a Hallmark movie again?” There’s that glint in Macfarlane’s eye, that “goofy, adorable” laugh Urie still remembers from two decades ago—the stuff a camera can’t get enough of. Yes, we’re going to talk about Hallmark. We order another round of Power of the Dogs.

When Hallmark first came calling for 2014’s The Memory Book, Macfarlane had little idea of the frenzy behind the channel—the drinking games, the “147 New Christmas Movies to Watch This Year” listicles, the smiley promo tours. He was just being offered a lead (straight) role in a cozy TV movie after toiling through the guest-star trenches for a few years. The money was good and the set was well-run. “I sometimes wonder if Hallmark even knew I was gay when they first started to put me in the movies,” he says with a laugh. “I remember reading the script and being like, What is this? It’s very light, and there’s flannel, and a canoe ride. And it’s delightful! I didn’t understand.”

He did another movie in 2015, and another one in 2016. Then he accelerated. In total, Macfarlane has appeared in 13 Hallmark movies over the past eight years, with more on the way. (He recently signed a multi-movie deal with Crown Media Family Networks, Hallmark’s parent company, which he’s set to finish up in the fall.) He’s enjoyed himself. Titles have ranged from The Mistletoe Promise and A Shoe Addict’s Christmas to Christmas in My Heart. Macfarlane has wandered into countless meet-cutes, “almost-kiss” blunders, gingerbread house constructions, and ice-skating afternoons. He’s faked being freezing while filming in August. He is the guy of every girl’s dreams: firefighters and toy-company CEOs and budding chefs. If you know these movies, you know exactly the type.

These films sell a heteronormative fantasy, which Bros incisively parodies with its running joke of a “Hallhark” Christmas universe. Initially, as we talk about his work on Hallmark movies, Macfarlane describes his own approach to, well, acting in them. “I always felt like I’d kind of wink at the camera a little bit because I knew that the most provocative thing they were putting on air was a gay man playing everybody’s fireman—that satisfied me for a while,” he says. (In turn, I ask him about the topic of straight actors playing gay—which Bros also lampoons: “I have not arrived on an opinion. On one level, I’m here because of the commitment by the studio and Billy and Nick and [producer] Judd [Apatow] to cast me, but also, I don’t like telling anybody that they’re not allowed to play something…. I’m so excited to see Leonard Bernstein played by Bradley Cooper. I can’t think of another person I’d like to see do that.”)

Deeper into our conversation, Macfarlane turns more candid. “If you go to my IMDB page, there’s a lot of me holding hands with some nice Christian white lady—like, yeah, I’m terrified. I’m totally freaked out by that,” he says. “We all come from somewhere. We all got to learn our stuff. But there’s this thing you can do. You can try to hide who you are, and you can kind of try to sort of whitewash—but at the end of the day, it’s always more interesting than you could ever write. ‘The fucking dude from Hallmark is gay? What!’ I hope that I don’t get judged for that. I hope that people understand that they gave me jobs when other people weren’t giving me jobs.” A pause. “But it’s embarrassing.”

I disagree. The subversive nature of him being the face of those movies as culture changed so quickly around them—same-sex marriage was legalized the year after Macfarlane’s Hallmark debut—is significant. Plus, hell if he didn’t shore up his leading-man bona fides. Last year, he starred in Netflix’s queer rom-com Single All the Way, which, unlike the R-rated Bros, works within a relatively Hallmarkian template. Macfarlane tells me that those behind both Bros and his Hallmark films were “not happy” that he made the movie, occupying an uncomfortable middle ground between his past and future career points. “I had to say yes because there is a part of me that goes, ‘I’ve done a lot of these Hallmark movies where I play a straight man. I’d like to tip the hat to something,’” Macfarlane explains. It’s another example of principled, considered choice in an industry that leaves little room for that, particularly for LGBTQ+ artists.

Hallmark has started representing more gay couples and people of color…slowly. “Being able to be a leading man, as both playing straight and still being out and proud—Hallmark sort of evolved with Luke, and maybe even because of Luke,” says Urie. Urie costarred in Single All the Way, and adds that Macfarlane helped shape at least one part of the film through his Hallmark experiences. In one sequence, the pair transport a Christmas tree from a lot to Urie’s mom’s house, and they were unsure how to shoot it: “Luke was like, ‘Oh no, I got this, I’ve done 10 of these.’ He’d literally done 10 scenes where they buy a Christmas tree.”

So back to the question: Will Macfarlane keep doing Hallmark when his contract ends? “I don’t think they’ll ever have me back after today,” he says after a chuckle.

All this led to Bros. Macfarlane knows the tropes, the big notes to hit, to sell the hell out of falling in love and the terror at the thought of losing it. Now he gets to put the craft to work. The movie is dirty and raunchy, sure—a Hallmark star, naked in not one but two foursomes; shield your eyes!—but it’s also rich, wending its way toward big philosophical questions regarding the pain and promise of gay romantic life.

And damn, is he good in Bros—sexy, increasingly hilarious, weirdly heartbreaking. He unveils himself as a movie star more with every kiss and tear and confession. I’d just seen the film as we first met outside LACMA’s entrance, and was taken aback by how much he resembled his character, Aaron—“a gay Tom Brady,” as Eichner’s Bobby calls him. It’s not just the cap or the shirt or the easy wit. The more we talk, the more I see it in that Hallmark insecurity, resembling Aaron’s struggle to see himself outside of a meathead 9-to-5 cliché. Or in Aaron’s love of country music—specifically Garth Brooks—which comes directly from Macfarlane. “He is not identical to Aaron in any way,” Eichner, who cowrote the film, clarifies. “But in both broad and specific ways, there’s overlap between him and Aaron. It helped me and Nick as writers, fleshing out his character.”

Stoller says he couldn’t even picture the part until Macfarlane walked in to audition for him and Apatow. “It was one of those magical audition moments where he walked in and I 100% got it,” Stoller says. “Billy and I looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It’s done.’”

The three would have coffee periodically and talk about life: dating, sex, all of that messiness. Filming was supposed to start in March 2020, and then, of course, it didn’t. “I remember my manager saying, ‘You might have to let this one go,’” Macfarlane recalls. He was used to that kind of stuff; what’s another disappointment? But the movie did not go away. In fact, over the year-plus that they waited to enter production, Macfarlane and Eichner came to know each other, developing a prickly, intimate friendship that’s reflected in the film. Macfarlane is a hockey fan—naturally—and one day, he took Eichner to a game with great seats behind the visiting goalie’s net. They got into a deep conversation about Angels in America. “Billy goes, ‘I bet we’re the only people at Staples Center that are talking about Angels in America,’” Macfarlane says. “He was like, ‘This is Bros. This is our movie.’”

Eichner felt the spark the second they met: “Romantic comedies really live and die based on the chemistry of the two central characters and the main couple. No matter how good the script is, you need that chemistry there. Right off the bat, there was something special between me and Luke.”

Macfarlane’s Aaron has more of a foot in the straight world, so to speak, than Eichner’s Bobby. He has straight friends; his relatively conservative parents are accepting if not fully embracing of his gay life. Bobby, meanwhile, is preparing to launch an LGBTQ+ history museum and hosts an explicit podcast about gay life. Again, there’s some life imitating art here. Eichner and Macfarlane went out to dinner a few weeks ago and had a spirited back-and-forth over the topic of friend groups. “He says, ‘The majority of my friends are gay men,’ and I said to him, ‘Isn’t that a failure?’” Macfarlane recalls. “I knew I was being a little bit provocative. I love gay people, obviously. But I always thought, if I can be so bold, the assignment of living is to know as much as possible, and as many people as possible.”

As Macfarlane slurps the last of his second Power of the Dog at Fanny’s, he shows me a picture of a huge screen door he recently built for a friend. His woodworking hobby comes up in all of my conversations about him. He built a dollhouse for Bros producer Josh Church’s daughter. Stoller, who also cast Macfarlane in his upcoming Apple TV+ comedy series Platonic, says the actor carved him and his wife, writer Francesca Delbanco, “one of the most beautiful cutting boards you’ve ever seen,” before adding, “He’s one of those Hallmark movie characters—in real life.”

Urie describes it best: “He literally built his house, which is so butch and yet so gay.” It’s hard to think of a more perfectly reductive—or really, revelatory—description for Hollywood’s newest leading man. “I knew there was never really a place for me, or I never thought there was,” he says of why it took until now to make his first studio movie. “I hope that there might be some places for me now.”

Bros premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, and will be released in theaters on September 30, via Universal Pictures. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest films and stars.