‘I felt like it was an important story to tell’
◆ With divorce drama Our Son now streaming, stars Luke Evans and Billy Porter talk to Rachael Davis about the film’s story of love, loss and parenting
Break-ups aren’t always a cataclysmic event. Sometimes, people just fall out of love; the person you once thought you’d grow old with walks out of the door one day and doesn’t come back. Sometimes, it’s a quiet fading away of what once was.
When we meet Nicky and Gabriel in Bill Oliver’s Our Son, they’re on the cusp of this sort of break-up. They’ve been married for 13 years, and seem to have a perfect life in their gorgeous New York home with their cute son Owen, but their days as a couple – and, indeed, as a family – are numbered.
When Gabriel, played by Billy Porter, announces to Nicky, played by Luke Evans, that he wants a divorce, their picture-perfect life cracks in two.
It’s a story all of us know well, whether we’ve been through it ourselves or seen it played out on screen, but rarely do we see how divorce proceedings and custody battles affect couples in samesex marriages.
“It’s a universal story, it’s based on an experience that, sadly, is very, very common around the world – people sadly break up all the time, marriages break up, children are involved – so it’s very relatable,” explains Welsh actor Evans, 44.
“It’s painful, and there’s a lot of sadness to the story. But you haven’t seen it from the gay point of view before.”
“I’m 54, I’ve lived with four decades of coming out stories. I’m tired,” adds Porter, who’s known for a successful Broadway career and starring roles in Pose and Cinderella.
“It’s like, what happens after that? Where are the stories that help us understand how to move through life after coming out?
“It was so wonderful to read the script. It’s just a day in the life of some folks who happen to be queer. It’s a human story. It’s not a heterosexual story, it’s not a homosexual story. It’s a human story.”
Watching these two dads go through the experience of divorce, learning what it means to be single parents and how to live without the partner they’ve had by their side for the past 13 years, their heartbreak and pain is tangible. It also becomes clearer, scene by scene, why they’re actually not right for each other, and how their relationship might change for the better in a platonic, co-parenting dynamic.
“What I loved about Nicky, my character, is he’s so lost, he doesn’t understand – he thinks he can salvage it, he thinks there’s a way through it,” says Evans, known for The Hobbit, The Girl On The Train and Beauty And The Beast.
“And there’s this journey, that treacherous road of divorce and custody and all of that, and I just related to it hugely, and I felt such empathy for both Gabriel and Nicky. And I felt like it was an important story to tell.
“How they viewed fatherhood was different,
very different,” he says of Nicky and Gabriel’s divide. “Nicky’s confusion (was) that he thought he was doing everything right, he was doing what his dad did: He went to work, he pays the bills, puts a roof over their heads, makes sure the fridge is full of food, takes them on a holiday every now and again. But he works a lot.
“My dad was that person, he had to work. My mum was a housewife… I saw a lot of parallels between life that I’d lived and then these two people.”
“What I found interesting was how important the transparency of communication is in a relationship, and how easily it disappears,” adds Porter.
Of course, at the heart of
their relationship is Owen, their eight-year-old son who they both love dearly, played by Christopher Woodley.
“Once Gabriel had left the house, (Nicky)’s left with this little human being who he really doesn’t have the relationship (with) that he has with his other dad,” Evans says.
“And he has to look after him, and he has to start understanding him, and the kid has to understand his dad. (Owen) wants to go to (his) Papa, he doesn’t want to stay with Dad – and that must be very painful to go through as well.
“You now realise you actually didn’t invest enough time in your child, but now he’s yours, and you’re in the house, and you have to make
him breakfast, and all the things that you didn’t have to do before, you now have to do. That part of the story was beautiful to play.”
Despite the pain and anguish inherent to Gabriel and Nicky’s story, spending time with the characters feels refreshing because their love – for each other, in whatever form that might now take, and for their son – is so tangible.
“Even though… the relationship starts to fall apart very early on in act one, you never feel that they don’t love each other,” Evans notes.
“There’s a pain there, even though one is deciding to leave. You can’t forget 13 years of life investment, relationship investment.”
“There’s a hope in it,” says
Porter. “I believe this, that people come into your life for a reason, a season and/or a lifetime. This piece allows for that lifetime part to come into view by the end. And that’s hope…
“It’s hard, and it’s devastating when a marriage doesn’t work… (but) just because the marriage part didn’t work out, doesn’t mean that that relationship can’t evolve into something actually better.
“Sometimes I’ve seen it, where it evolves into actually something better. And the people become best friends.” he says.
“I’ve seen it, and it’s beautiful.”