I feel very grateful. I wasn't raised with money. My parents were schoolteachers; I was raised on a small farm. It never dawned on me that I would have a job that someone would pay me to do. Much less a job like this. It would be ridiculous if I had any complaints about it. And look - I've had the opportunity to learn an entirely new set of skills, and I'm bringing them to the work I'm doing now in filmmaking.
I've never been able to write for myself. I was doing a lot. I produced The Green, I wrote it - I didn't see myself in the world of this film. I'm sure there are elements of dark corners of my psyche that found their ways on screen; you didn't need my mug up there. There was enough of my essence in the story as it plays out without me acting in it.
I share with a lot of people who have seen The Green film at gay film festivals when you are the only gay guy on the block, you feel this responsibility to be this ambassador. You spend a lot of time making sure that other people feel comfortable with you. The perception that we project on that community, that gets in the way of a clear line of communication.
Accusations against gay schoolteachers figure really prominently in liberal news headlines, because they're attention-grabbing and ratings-getting. They last a news cycle and go away and then you never hear about them again.
Before my commercial career, I never played for more than an audience of 99 seats somewhere in downtown New York, but occasionally someone would recognize me in the subway and say, "Oh, I saw you in that play, you were really great in that," or "the director was really something." It becomes a conversation. When people spot me on the street from my work in commercials, there's nowhere for the conversation to go. Obviously I'm an actor and I can't.
I think someone's sexual orientation is great fodder for gossip. But again, it's non-news to me or anyone who knows me.
I did one interview with the Atlantic. It was very interesting; I could write an entire book on that one experience. I've never had any type of public persona outside of the face recognition I have with this job, so I was really ill prepared to have this conversation. I think the real story was that it became a source for a flurry of other derivative stories. I remember the Post headline said "Marcarelli's Bizarre Life," which to me is code for gay, primarily.
I've spent hundreds of days on commercial sets in the last ten years. If I didn't learn something along the way, I wasn't paying very close attention.
I have no hoarding tendencies whatsoever. I'm a purger. I am constantly throwing things out. Like everyone, I have a scary junk drawer or corner of the closet. And those little dark corners weigh on me enough to know how hard it must be to be a hoarder. And I also think that's why these hoarding shows are so popular, because it taps into something we all feel in ourselves. We hold onto things we don't need.
Whenever you create something that has a gay theme, it's inherently political. It's important that the intentions of the people behind the project be known. In discussing my sexual orientation, I found it to be germane to the topic of the film. It's what made The Green relatable and personal to me, but I've been out since I was 19. I've never been in the closet, so to say.
I feel like the places where I like to live, or study, or visit are places where people's differences are celebrated rather than just tolerated.
I just try to bring a kind of consciousness to the work I'm doing. I'll worry about the next job when I have the next job. There are a lot worse things than being known for a certain kind of specificity. You'll get calls for that thing. And that's better than not getting any calls at all.
