Matthew Goode talks to The Advocate: “I would’ve been very happy to snuggle up to the rug on Colin Firth’s chest”

What a wonderful evening of reading it has been. I’ve just finished a really nicely done interview with Matthew Goode who portrays Colin Firth’s deceased lover in A Single Man.

The actor has starred in such films as Brideshead Revisited, Match Point, Imagine You and Me, Watchman, Chasing Liberty and the upcoming Leap Year opposite Amy Adams.

The actor chatted with Brandon Voss for The Advocate and he seems to me to be someone very comfortable in his own skin. Here are some excerpts:

Goode appears as Jim, the deceased lover that Colin Firth’s college professor mourns in a series of intimate flashbacks.

Tom Ford has said that A Single Man is “not a gay film.” As the actor kissing Colin Firth on-screen, how do you see it?
I kind of agree with him. He wasn’t making it as a political piece, and the theme of love and loss is fairly universal. Obviously you can’t escape the fact that these are men kissing, but what’s lovely about George’s remembrances of Jim is the fact that it’s not a sweaty clinch — which would’ve been fine, because I would’ve been very happy to snuggle up to the rug on Colin Firth’s chest. It was remembrances like sitting on the sofa reading books together, and there’s a beauty in the banality of those scenes that also speaks to their universality. You can call it a gay film, but what’s really nice it is that it shows the intimacy between two adult males as absolutely normal and exactly the same as heterosexual intimacy.

Colin told me that you were a good kisser. What did you think of his skills?
Right back at ’im. Sometimes you see straight actors trying to portray gay men as very aggressive, so the kissing is superaggressive and rough. I’m sure that does exist, but we liked that our kissing was sensitive.
Compared to shooting love scenes with a woman, do you find it more challenging to get intimate with another straight man?
Well, I’ll let you know when I have to do something with full-frontal. But I don’t think you can have an erection in a scene, and I always find that funny: If you’re going to have sex, you can’t suddenly have the man springing into bed with a floppy knob. It should be a little bit saturated with semen and standing out at an odd angle with a few veins involved. [Laughs] Obviously I’m a man who likes women and has a child now, but I’m not squeamish and I love all people. If you’ve been entrusted to do the job, then you find something to love in the other character and you do your job.

Young American actors sometimes shy away from gay parts for fear of being pigeonholed or mistaken for gay in real life. As a British actor, is that something you’ve ever been concerned about?
I’ve never looked at those kinds of roles as something to be avoided. I somehow ended up doing three in a row, really, with Brideshead, Watchmen, and A Single Man, so I steadily got more gay. I was “full gay” in this one. But the parts were all so good. I wouldn’t do a bad story with a character that was just gay for gay’s sake — which sounds like a porno, which I’m not particularly into. But I know what you mean about Americans. There’s a real problem with masculinity and sensitivity in Hollywood. I don’t blame actors for not coming out because America might then have a problem with watching them kissing Cameron Diaz. And then there are certain actors who don’t want people to think, I wonder if he’s really gay, because he did terribly well in that gay part. America’s a slightly harder country, where men are constantly trying to be men. And it’s not just Hollywood; everyone goes to the gym.

To read the entire interview, go to Advocate.com.