It’s just been announced that Nathan Lane will helm a Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman.  He’ll be joined by Laurie Metcalf as his devoted wife Linda.  I guess the real news is that the producing team of this revival will be Barry Diller and Scott Rudin!  The casting of Lane in a quintessentially heterosexual role belies the argument that gays can only play gay.  Note his most recent effort was Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern.  Surely, two roles couldn’t be more different.  But Lane, one of our greatest actors, effortlessly transcends pigeonholing.

This issue came up again with HBO’s new series Heated Rivalry.  Given the subject matter, I’m surprised more of you haven’t written in.  Surely my mentioning it will translate into tens of more viewers and an inevitable ratings spike.  The show centers around two closeted hockey players in their mid-20s.  Since it’s a “rivalry”, you won’t be surprised to learn one of the players is Canadian, while the other is Russian.  And the “heated” part – well, I suppose that’s self-explanatory.  CNN said it best in the headline for their review: “Heated Rivalry is everything you love about rom-coms but with less pants”.  Believe it or not, that didn’t even come from Anderson Cooper!

While nobody has sent in a question, series creator Jacob Tierney was asked about the sexuality of his leads, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.  So I guess this week it’s an Ask Jacob question.  And this is how he answered: “I don’t think there’s any reason to get into that stuff.  I’ll tell you something about the casting of both of these roles.  You can’t ask questions like that when you’re casting, right?  It’s actually against the law.  So what you have to gauge is somebody’s enthusiasm and willingness to do the work.”  Clearly he found two people who did just that – enough so that people are speculating about their sexuality.  “That’s what’s so impressive about both of these guys is they came into this being like, ‘Yeah, we’re here to do this, and we are here to make this story feel authentic and to be as real as possible.’  And they fucking hit it out of the park.”  And isn’t that the point?  I don’t believe Nathan Lane was ever a travelling salesman…or married to a woman!  But if he can make me believe that, then he’s done his job.  If you believe you have a shot with either of these hockey players, they’ve done their job.  And speaking of jobs, there’s quite a few “jobs” the boys perform on each other, which you can see on BillyMasters.com.

Some people believe certain things should remain private.  Obviously some people ain’t me.  Last week, Matt Rogers was on Elle magazine’s Phoning It In.  If, like me, you have no idea what this is, the guest makes prank calls to friends and tries to rile them up with an outrageous lie.  For instance, Matt called Bowen Yang to accuse him of sexting with his “Below Deck” beau, Fraser Olender.  Obviously a lie.  However, things got dicey when Matt called the aforementioned Olender to say he’s been asked to do a full-frontal nude scene in a film.  Fraser’s response?  “Absolutely not.  I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”  Rogers doubled down, saying the film starred Jessica Chastain and had Oscar buzz – clearly only a foreigner would believe that!  Fraser stuck to his guns: “Absolutely not.  I mean, listen, you do you.  I’ll support you 100%.  Some things are not necessarily meant to be televised.  That could be the British in me.”  When Matt got home, perhaps the British was in him!