Here are some other highlights:
Making Love has a lot in common with Brokeback Mountain in that it caused so much hoopla about straight actors playing gay roles — and particularly characters who have sex on screen.
That all changed with Philadelphia, I think. Our movie was made before the whole AIDS situation had even been discovered, so it was not a part of how people perceived the gay community then. There was a kind of innocence to the world we inhabited that hasn’t been there since. There’s always this thing in the background now. When Tom did Philadelphia, people began to accept that an actor is an actor and you can play any part. Before that, when we did Making Love, it was unconscionable that a straight actor would play a gay role as blatantly as we did. It hadn’t been done before. Perception blended us with our characters. We had to be gay or we wouldn’t have done it. I always found that kind of amusing. I never shied away from that. I never said, “You’re wrong.” I’d say 90% of the people who saw that film thought Michael and I had to be gay.
Did that affect your choices about future films?
Yeah. I don’t go so far as to connect the dots but Making Love is the last studio picture I ever made. You want to connect some dots there, you can. I was never able to make another studio picture after that.
Speaking of someone who thinks you’re sexy, Harry loves…Lisa’s lips.
I do. When I met Lisa, I had no idea that she had anything done to her lips. I love them the way they are. She confessed to me months after we got together that she had injections in her lips. I went, “OK, that’s like getting a tattoo I guess.”
Harry Loves Lisa airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EST on TV Land. For more info, visit the show’s official website. Harry Hamlin’s new book, Full Frontal Nudity is now in stores.
