One of the hits of this year’s Pride Film Festival, had the full house audience falling out of their chairs, howling and writhing with laughter. The follow up to the cult hit, Another Gay Movie – Another Gay Sequel – was every bit as rude and crude as its predecessor but delighted what looked like a usually well behaved and sombre Perth crowd. Zoe Carter caught up with one of the stars of both films, Jonah Blechman, to talk about his fabulously flamboyant character, Nico, and just what happened to the rest of the original cast….

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‘When I initially read the script for the first film, I thought “I’ll never do this, ever”. And I’d never done any comedy before either, so I think a lot of things scared me about it, but it stayed with me. I worked with Todd [writer/director Todd Stephens], and Todd said “You want to sexualize him because it’s rare, it’s rare that we ever sexualize the sissy.”’ He let me bring a lot of endearment and truthfulness to that vibration of how high he was. So for me I had to have a higher octave in my voice. Nico is this light character, I had to be calibrated by Tod. He’d be like “Lighter, higher! More,more, more!” In our initial rehearsals for our first film, he calibrated me to this hype place and that was really where the character was. Ever since that it was about getting into this zone of where Nico is. As far as how I can relate, I certainly pull from being the stereotype, or being the outsider, of what that is emotionally… I grew up as a dancer, I was around a lot of that energy too. So I certainly did draw on that.. bumping it up, and living through that character. Once I got through the fear of it, it became this liberating experience for me. And I hope that’s what people are inspired by or got from it.

‘…By the time we got to the second film I got to have my hand in just so many aspects of the film. I even got to co-direct, and co-choreograph the musical number in the film, it was just so much more of an endeavor for me. It was just so much fun, it was like a gay summer camp shooting this film out in Florida, with all these bright, young, talented, queer, pop culture people…Everyone was really great, and I think everyone came to this project excited to be a part of it. There wasn’t any diva attitudes or anything it was wonderful.

‘We knew one of the boys, Jonathon Chase, was not going to be participating in the sequel… because he wasn’t able to do any press for the first film. A week before we went in to preproduction, the last two boys, Mitch Moores and Michael Carbonero, they both stepped away … They were really instrumental in helping develop the characters up to that point and then they dropped out because they got freaked out about their careers and their agents gave them a real ultimatum about ‘”if you do another gay movie, or Another Gay Sequel,” that that would really affect their careers.

Earlier on in my career I experienced what I think they went through. I did a film called This Boys Life where I played a queer character and I got a lot of publicity around that, and my own agents and managers … wanted to make sure that I wasn’t out there doing any other roles that were queer of any sort… And then it became this self occurring prophecy of not being able to share those colours that I’m pretty familiar with. I kinda had to make a decision because my own career and the work I was doing, it just stopped, it didn’t have much depth or it wasn’t a lead of any kind. I had to take an inventory of who I am in my work and who I am in my life and how I want to move forward, and I got to blow the doors open when I did Hedwig on tour in the States. That was one of the incredible roles I’d ever done to date, and it made sense for me to let it be okay whether it was known that I was queer or not. When I found Another Gay Movie and really got into it, I knew what I was jumping in to. I had already let go of having to hold on to that fear. To be honest, it’s something I understand for other people, but I feel so much more confident with my sexuality as a man and a masculine man, because of the level of femininity I hit in these movies specifically. I feel like that about my own sexuality just as an actor, so I feel more comfortable playing straight now or being in a relationship with a woman on screen, probably than I would have been prior to, which I didn’t expect, but you just get into your skin and you just become an actor. Like when straight people play gay characters, it’s not that big of a deal.

‘People felt that there was a little more heart in this one than in the first one… Maybe it was the timing of things, it’s like breaking your cherry the first time it hurts, but the second time… You can play around and enjoy it a little bit more, you just need to break your cherry!’

OUTinPerth has one copy of the Another Gay Sequel DVD to give away, courtesy of Beyond Home Entertainment. To win a copy, visit our giveaways page.