PLEASE LIKE HIM (AGAIN)
Josh Thomas surprised the ABC (and perhaps even himself) with the success of his almost-biographical series, Please Like Me. John Richards visited Josh on set in Melbourne, where he filmed season two, for this exclusive behind-the-scenes report.
On set with Josh Thomas – tales from the making of the second season of his hit show.
A YOUNG MAN and woman are lying in the hallway of a traditional Melbourne share house talking about relationships, friendships and future plans. They’ve clearly known each other a long time and their banter is charming and funny yet hints at things unsaid. She’s planning to leave the country and he is not happy. They’re both trying to f ind their way forward. It’s the sort of “big picture” conversation a lot of people f ind themselves having in their twenties and it would seem completely natural except for two things. The f irst is that a pile of chairs are stacked to the ceiling behind them, trapping a third friend in a room from which he occasionally calls out. The second is that they are surrounded by a camera crew. A dozen people and equipment are crammed into the small space around them while another dozen hover silently outside the door.
It’s day 39 of the second season shoot for Please Like Me. “Cut” calls Matt Saville, who has the vaguely pugilistic bearing common to Australian directors.
“I was great in that,” drawls actor Caitlin Stasey to no-one in particular, her tongue firmly in cheek. “I was beautiful in that.”
Please Like Me has become an unexpected comedy hit for the ABC. After initial poor treatment from the national broadcaster – delaying the broadcast, then switching the show’s debut from ABC1 to the poorer-rating ABC2 for unclear reasons – Please Like Me has become much loved both at home and in the USA, where cable channel Pivot has been instrumental in helping it get picked up for a second season. The ABC’s even repeating it on ABC1 now – and pretending they always liked it, really.
The show follows the adventures of Josh, played by creator/executive producer/star Josh Thomas. His girlfriend breaks up with him, explaining it’s because Josh is gay, and Josh makes his first fumbling encounters with Geoffrey while his mother ends up in hospital following a suicide attempt. And that’s just the first five minutes of episode one. Please Like Me has been compared to HBO’s Girls in the way it combines comedy and drama, as well as giving voice to a younger generation. The other comparison is the FX series Louie, if the star of that show were an awkward young gay man with a bewildering accent instead of an awkward middle-aged straight ginger.
IT’S THE SECOND day of filming in the hallway and the crew have started to get a little stircrazy. Josh’s house is – slightly surprisingly – a real house, which comes with certain challenges. From watching season one I had assumed it was a set, the Italian-Nonnameets- Frankie- magazine aesthetic being so quintessentially “Melbourne share house” it didn’t seem possible it was real. Designer Penny Southgate has done such a fantastic job of making this tired Thornbury house so believably Josh’s home it’s hard to know which elements are original and which were brought in by the crew.
There are personal touches everywhere – there’s an authentic picture on a shelf of Josh and co-star Tom Ward, who are also best friends in real life. There’s a gorgeous red KitchenAid mixer (that, in all honesty, the characters in the show probably couldn’t afford) which turns out to be a 21st birthday present to real life Josh. And there are loads of props the boys brought in, including, unexpectedly, a wicker chicken.
“I’m fairly certain that’s Josh’s chicken,” says publicist Alicia. And, touchingly, there’s an oil painting of Aunty Peg (Judi Farr) in the kitchen. It will probably never be directly shown on camera but it means she’s still in the series, if only in spirit. Aunty Peg died in season one.
In many ways the Please Like Me shoot is the same as any other television production. The producers look like hipsters and the crew is full of rough trade. No matter where you stand you’ll always be in the way. But Please Like Me is slightly different in that it has a resident dog. John is a cavoodle with an on-screen role in the series but even when he’s not on camera he’s on set. He’s also a very natty dresser. Today he’s wearing a striped top, but he has many different outfits. Sometimes he even wears a dickie bow.
“He’s all class,” explains Josh as he passes. For the first series they had a dedicated dog wrangler but now John just gets passed around the crew when they start filming. First Assistant Director Annie Maver is such a fan of John she tries to get him into any scene she can, regardless of the script.
Gay people sometimes think we’re all a team… And they think when I talk I’m representing them… and they get annoyed I’m not representing the team the way they want. We’re not a team. Thank God.
In real life, Josh Thomas is not that far from his Please Like Me persona. There’s a certain anxiousness in his answers, a way he second guesses himself. Although in a reversal of the usual television trend he is surprisingly taller than I expected. I ask him what he learnt from the first series that changed the way he approached the second.
“I just knew nothing when we made the first series. I’d never been on a drama set. So the list of things I learned is just everything there is to know about film production. I’d done panel shows and shows where you sit behind a desk and you don’t have to know anything. I know what a First AD does now. I understand…
“When we were scripting season one I used to get really frustrated with all this pedantic detail. [I’d say] ‘the car does this’ and they’re like, ‘Yeah, but what kind of car?’ ‘Just a car, I don’t know!’ Now I know somebody actually does have to pick the car. I hadn’t quite realised that everybody has to make every decision and I need to put it in the script.
“This series was a lot easier just because people knew what we were doing. People knew the style. Knowing the actors who are going to read the lines. They can see what I see a bit clearer. Hopefully. Whereas last season I had to explain… now they’ve seen it and they like it, it’s easier.”
The second series exists in large part due to Pivot and he’s been over to the States a couple of times to promote it. Has the US success gone to his head?
“A boy recognised me on Grindr. And a hot boy came up to me in a club. Oh, and I bought a cupcake in New York and the girl who sold me the cupcake said she really liked my show. That was pretty good. And that’s really the demographic I’m going for: homosexuals and girls that sell cupcakes. So I guess that’s basking in the glory? Still charged me for the fucking cupcake, though. Still had to pay for it. It’s weird because I’m there so little and people are watching it and stuff happens over there and you just don’t know. Like we got nominated for a GLAAD award and it was just like, ‘Oh, they watched it!’”
One of the things that’s refreshing about Please Like Me is the way it just presents the gay characters as gay without making it much of an issue. I ask Josh if it’s true that the development of the series started before Josh, in real life, was out? “We started when I was straight, yeah.” The central character comes out in the first few minutes of Please Like Me and never looks back. Does he feel it’s easier for gay guys to come out now?
“Of course it is. I mean, it has to be easier. I mean, it depends on which gay guy… this is what I get worried about. People are always
like that’s so good, it’s not a big deal. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes a big deal, it doesn’t mean those stories aren’t completely legitimate, you know? A TV show that opens with a guy coming out and his dad beating him up and kicking him out on the street and him being homeless is completely real and legitimate. That happens. It’s just this is how it happened to me and how it happens to quite a lot of gays now.
“Most people I know that I’ve seen come out, they’re a bit unsure and they haven’t wanted to tell people they’re gay until they’ve tried it. And then someone comes along and they fall in love with them and then they come to terms with it… for me, anyway. I fell in love with a boy so I bothered to kiss him. In our show Josh doesn’t fall in love with him because it happens in the first six minutes and that’s quite a difficult thing to sell in six minutes, so I just made him really pretty.
“So coming out just wasn’t dramatic for me. I sent my dad a text message and he called me and said, ‘Be careful of AIDS.’ Don’t get AIDS was basically the whole exchange. My brother told my mum and then she called me on a train and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you having a boyfriend?’ And I said, ‘I can’t chat. I’m on a train.’ ‘Okay!’ Never really spoke about it again. That was it. And that’s how it is for a lot of people but for some people it’s not like that.”
Did you get complaints that you weren’t representing the entirety of the gay experience?
“Yeah, ’cos you know how gay people sometimes think we’re all a team? And they think when I talk I’m representing them as a team and they get annoyed I’m not representing the team the way they want. We’re not a team. Thank God. I don’t want to be a team with a lot of homosexuals. A lot of homosexuals are awful. They write like ‘no Asians’ on their Grindr profiles and stuff. They’re fucked sometimes. It’s just one person’s story. I don’t have this conversation about the mum being bipolar, no one says, ‘It’s so good [to see] the bipolar story’ or ‘why did you represent bipolar people like this?’ It’s just a guy dealing with some stuff.”
As creator, producer, writer and star Josh could easily have made Please Like Me a terrible vanity project, and yet his character is often presented as the worst person in the show. Was that deliberate?
“I think I might have a lot of self-loathing. He’s not that likeable, right? I really wish sometimes I’d made myself a paramedic. You know what I mean? Saving lives and being really nice to the mum… of course I wanted the character to be real and a bit hopeless. You don’t want a fucking main character that is really lovely and perfect; it’ d just be a shit show. But maybe I’m more unlikeable than I thought I was. Maybe sometimes I think I’m being really charming and I’m not? I mean, Larry David’s really annoying but I really like him in that show [ Curb Your Enthusiasm]. That’s what’s fun about it. You need me to make bad choices. You just need plot. And if I make a lot of good choices the episodes f inish
I think I might have a lot of self-loathing. [The character] is not that likeable, right? You don’t want a main character that is really lovely and perfect; it’d just be a shit show.
really quickly. In series two, I think, some characters get a bit worse.”
Josh has started working on ideas for season three, which has been commissioned. He’s so involved with all aspects on production, what is his favourite part of the process?
“Writing’s the hardest part because you have to make something from nothing. Preproduction’s my favourite. I like picking costumes. I like the days when we have food and they bring in different pictures of macaroni and cheese and I pick what I want my macaroni and cheese to look like… that’s the best bit.”