Eichner on streets to whip audiences into frenzy
In bid to challenge Hollywood status quo, rom-com ‘Bros’ has a lot riding on it
At the Toronto International Film Festival world premiere of “Bros,” Billy Eichner exhorted the crowd to keep cheering.
“Keep it going!” he implored. “I want a longer ovation than ‘The Whale’!”
In the whistle-stop lead-up to the recent release of “Bros,” Eichner has worked tirelessly to whip audiences into a frenzy for a film unlike any Hollywood has before produced. A lot is riding on the movie, and not just because Eichner, the 44-year-old “Billy on the Street” comedian, has been working five years on what is his big-screen breakthrough. “Bros” is the first major-studio gay rom-com and the first studio movie starring and co-written by an openly gay man.
In drumming up excitement, Eichner has promoted these distinctions, lamented that they’ve lasted this long and parodied his role in trying to pitch his movie to America. Revisiting his “Billy on the Street” persona, Eichner has run through Hollywood with Jack
Black shouting, “I need allies!” Sprinting around New York’s Flat Iron Building with Paul Rudd, he exclaimed, “I’ve been working 20 years for this! I need a straight person to go see ‘Bros!’ ”
At the MTV VMAs, Eichner put the stakes in more dramatic terms, urging people to see “Bros” because “we need to show all the homophobes like Clarence Thomas and all the homophobes on the Supreme Court that we want gay love stories and we support LGBTQ people
and we are not letting them drag us back into the last century because they are past and ‘Bros’ is the future.”
“Bros,” directed by Nicholas Stoller and produced by Judd Apatow, is a bid to challenge a Hollywood status quo that has been more comfortable making gay characters sidekicks, roommates or fodder for straight-actor transformation than protagonists in love stories. And by all accounts — a celebrated reception at TIFF, glowing reviews (95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and even the endorsement of hard-to-impress “Billy on the Street” regular Elena — Eichner has made the movie of the moment. Now, it’s the audience’s turn to prove Eichner’s prediction of a “Bros” future correct.
In a recent interview while the “Bros-Mobile,” a 44-seat mobile theater, was passing through Philadelphia on a national
tour, Eichner said he’d like everyone to see “Bros.” Sylvester Stallone? “I think Sylvester Stallone would love ‘Bros.’ ” Meryl Streep? “My God. She’s number one on my list.”
Made with an almost entirely LGBTQ cast, “Bros,” which stars Eichner and Luke Macfarlane, is an uncommonly intimate, R-rated view of gay life that’s funny, moving and a little furious about how LGBTQ characters have usually been portrayed in studio films.
Even the broadest comedies have struggled to find a foothold in theaters in recent years. Stoller, the director of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Neighbors,” has been mystified by that trend, and by the sluggish pace of inclusion in big-screen comedies.
Stoller initially reached out to Eichner about collaborating after being impressed by his
performance on “Friends From College,” a sitcom Stoller created with his wife, Francesca Delbanco. The two men worked on a screenplay for two years, beginning with conversations Stoller compares to therapy sessions. As he did with Jason Segel in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and Russell Brand for “Get
Him to the Greek,” Stoller peppered Eichner with questions about his life.
“He really wanted to do these monologues, which I thought was risky but also really interesting,” says Stoller. “He comes from a kind of quasi-stand-up. Before ‘Billy on the Street’ he was doing off-Broadway stuff. So he’d write these monologues that were selfaware and kind of explaining to the audience.”
Eichner and Stoller aimed for something that would navigate the love life of a commitment-phobic New Yorker while honoring the unique complexities of gay love and commenting on its usual media portrayals. The result is a movie with a lot on its mind that still seeks to be a crowd-pleaser.
“This movie tested higher than any movie I’ve worked on in its first test screenings,” says Stoller. “Immediately, the audience loved it. It was interesting because you feel like the gay audience will laugh at certain jokes that the straight audience doesn’t get, but then everyone’s laughing at certain things together.”
Some have suggested Eichner has overplayed the historical nature of “Bros.” A Gawker headline read: “Billy Eichner is the first gay man ever.” There have been some recent films that centered on gay romance, like the more dramatic “Love, Simon” (2018), and streaming releases such as Netflix’s “Happiest Season” (2020) and Hulu’s “Fire Island” from earlier this year.
But “Bros” is trying to reach mainstream audiences in theaters within the very recognizable vehicle of an Apatow-produced comedy — to be 2022’s answer to “Knocked Up.” There has already been some evidence of trolling on the film. IMDB recently removed hundreds of one-star reviews for “Bros” in an apparent bid to review-bomb the film before it was released.
To Jim Rash, the “Descendants” writer and “Community” actor who plays a colleague of Eichner’s in the movie, the set of “Bros” was unlike any he had been on before.
“I’ve played characters that were straight. I’ve played gay. I’ve played in the closet. I’ve played might-be-gay. But ‘Bros’ was a movie where what you see on the screen is the entire representation of it,” says Rash. “There’s a safe space that comes with knowing that at the helm is someone who’s very much focused on the diversity of the environment that he was creating. It inherently had that because you were with your community.”
There are raunchy comic scenes in “Bros” and some of the genre’s tried-andtrue romantic moments. But one thing that may surprise fans of “Billy on the Street” is how earnest it can be.
“Just as much of an influence on ‘Bros’ as ‘Bridesmaids’ was ‘The Way We Were.’ I miss that about movies,” says Eichner.
“For gay men, especially, the romance of our lives is just nowhere to be found. There’s a lot to be cynical about in the world. But I think this is an opportunity for people to stop and say: Let’s take love stories and great comedies about life and the human condition as seriously as we take stories about a man dressed up as a bat saving Gotham City.”