‘Fire Island’ Star James Scully Dreams of Starring in an All-Queer ‘Avengers’ Movie
variety.comMarc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle EditorDoing press for “Fire Island” has been quite an emotional experience for James Scully, who plays Bowen Yang’s love interest in director Andrew Ahn’s new queer rom-com written by and starring Joel Kim Booster.“I have had these out of body moments where I’m like, remember when you thought you were going to have to pretend to be straight your whole life?” Scully tells me. “Remember when you thought that you were just going to have to find a really patient woman and marry her and just do the best that you could to make it work?”“Fire Island” is an LGBTQ take on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” The all-queer cast also includes Matt Rogers, Margaret Cho, Conrad Ricamora, Tomás Matos, Torian Miller, Nick Adams and Zane Phillips.
It takes place in the titular getaway, a vacation spot outside of New York City that has been a haven for the LGBTQ community since the 1920s.
Scully first visited Fire Island just before they shot the film. He was nervous to make the initial trip after he spent a day at the gay-friendly section of Will Rogers State Beach — nicknamed Ginger Rogers — in Santa Monica. “I was very publicly bullied for keeping my shirt on multiple times,” he recalls. “I texted my boyfriend being like, ‘Isn’t this what Fire Island is going to be like?
And instead of four hours on a beach it will be a week of my life.’ I went anyway, and I’m so glad that I did.”But then there was his first underwear party, a weekly bash — recreated perfectly in the movie — where a crowd of mostly gay men strip down to their skivvies for a night of dancing at a nightclub. “I was handing over the bag of my clothes to the clothes check… and they looked at me and were like, ‘Are you.
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