My interview with Christian Borle of “Smash”

Christian Borle brought along a lot of first-hand experience when he was cast as composer Tom Levitt on NBC’s Smash, a television show about the making of a Broadway musical.

Borle, 38, was nominated for a Tony Award for Legally Blonde and has  appeared in the Broadway musicals Mary Poppins, Spamalot and Thoroughly Modern Millie.

‘This is my first TV experience and I’m excited and I’m very happy,’ the actor says. ‘We are lucky.’

While he is straight in real life, Borle has had no problem playing a gay character on Smash which airs on Monday nights on NBC and has benefited greatly from a time slot that follows the ratings hit The Voice.

‘Coming from the theater, all my best friends are gay,’ Borle says. ‘It was important for me to know what [writers] wanted to do and how was this going to be different from what we’ve already seen.’

In last week’s episode of the show, Tom had a few dates with a lawyer and the pair ended up in bed together – something that just over 20 years ago caused ABC’s Thirtysomething to lose advertisers.

The two men were seen lying in bed together talking after the fact – admitting to each other that the sex was lousy – but were not actually seen kissing passionately as the show’s heterosexual characters often are.

‘We find ourselves on network television and I think just because where we are as a country, there’s a certain levels that they don’t want to go to,’ Borle says. ‘We see some straight sex in the first couple of episodes and we don’t see some gay sex in the first couple of episodes. I would push for showing the actual balance of that but we’ll see what America’s ready for.’

To read the rest of the story, go over to Gay Star News.