The first script that I read [ for the 1982 film ‘Making Love’] was much edgier than the script that ended up being shot and that’s what I liked about it. They kind of whitewashed it a little bit along the way thinking that the edginess of it would turn the audience off. They sanitized it at the studio.
Harry Hamlin speaking to the ‘Still Here Hollywood Podcast with Steve Kmetko’ on how playing gay in the 1982 film ‘Making Love’ still resonates with audiences today.
I read the script and I said ‘well this is about something actually going on in the world that nobody wants to talk about.’ It’s a real subject that’s real in society. It’s something that needs to be discussed and you start a conversation about this.
To this day, not a week goes by when someone doesn’t come up to me and says ‘God, thank you for making that film. It changed my life’ or ‘It helped me talk to my parents about my sexuality’ or whatever. Wherever I go to this day and I’m extraordinarily proud of that.
It didn’t have the greatest effect on my career, feature film career, but it did have, on the other side of that equation, a great, great positive effect on a huge community.
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That time Harry Hamlin played a gay man in 1982 and it almost destroyed his career
“Even though I was straight, I think the perception at the time was that anybody who could play gay must be gay.”
