Lukas Gage and Zachary Quinto on the ‘Unabashed Gayness’ of Their Raunchy SXSW Comedy ‘Down Low’
variety.comBrent Lang Executive Editor “Down Low,” an outrageous new comedy that premieres this week at SXSW, starts with a failed attempt at a happy ending.
And things go sharply downhill from there. The raunchy film is the brainchild of Lukas Gage, best known for being on the receiving end of Murray Bartlett’s, um, affections in “The White Lotus.” He wrote the film with Phoebe Fisher and stars as Cameron, a masseuse who is hired to get off Gary, a repressed millionaire played by Zachary Quinto.
It’s an attempt at alleviating pressure that careens dangerously off the rails as Gary and Cameron destroy several lives over the course of one crazy day and night.
Gage and Fisher were inspired to write the film after watching “Pretty Woman” and learning more about that rom-com’s original script, which was titled “3,000” and told a far darker tale about sex workers. “We had an idea — what if we made it queer?” Gage tells Variety. “What if we made it a little bit more insane?” The go-for-broke plot (and to say much more would be to spoil some truly WTF moments and ruin a cornucopia of twists and turns) was what appealed to Quinto, the openly gay “Star Trek” star. “I like the unabashed gayness of it,” Quinto says. “It didn’t apologize for itself.
Read more on variety.com
