BRO brovocative

Bros begins with Billy Eichner’s character, Bobby, mocking a Hollywood exec’s outrageous invitation to make a big-studio gay rom-com that appeals to straight men. “Am I gonna get buttfucked by Jason Momoa while we’re both worrying about a volcano?” Bobby asks, his caustic delivery effectively cutting the startled exec down to size.

It’s the kind of nightmare scenario that the forty-three-year-old Eichner, an openly gay actor for more than two decades, feared he might be in when Nick Stoller, who has directed dude-friendly rom-coms like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors and is notably straight, approached him about making a big-studio gay rom-com. “There’s something about being queer in Hollywood,” Eichner says from a well-appointed hotel room during an early-summer Zoom call. “It turns you into a fighter.” But Stoller and coproducer Judd Apatow didn’t want Eichner to warp or water down his vision for anyone. “Nick, to his credit, always said that the main thing was that the movie be honest and truthful,” Eichner says. “And that if it was, it would resonate with everyone.”

So he hung up his gloves and the three men got to work on (out September 30), billed as both the first big-studio movie starring and made by an almost entirely LGBTQ+ cast and crew and the first R-rated gay rom-com to be released by a major studio. The hilarious, heartfelt, and unflinching comedy features two confident and complicated gay men, Bobby and Aaron (played by Luke Macfarlane), stumbling toward love. Queer comedy stalwarts like Jim Rash, Dot-Marie Jones, Harvey Fierstein, Bowen Yang, and Guillermo Díaz, plus memorable newer arrivals like