'Fuller House' Star Juan Pablo Di Pace Talks About Accepting Being Gay

In a world where we’re used to everything being available in quick social media posts or truncated sound bites, when someone drops pertinent information in something as lengthy as a TED Talk, it may take a bit of time for the internet to realize it.

So many of us are just now finding out that Juan Pablo Di Pace spent a whole 21 minutes talking about being gay in a TEDxYouth talk that happened back in March and was finally released to YouTube at the very end of June.

Di Pace, who plays Fernando, the lovable on-and-off paramour to Kimmy Gibbler, in Netflix’s Fuller House, doesn’t seem to have discussed his sexuality publicly prior to this in depth discussion.

His TED Talk delved into how difficult it was growing up in Buenos Aires knowing he was gay, and dealing with bullies and learning how to love himself when the world around him wasn’t kind.

Di Pace also shared a hilarious anecdote about spending his early teen years drawing and selling hetero porn flip books to the kids who had bullied him to try to get their respect.

“In order to please others, what do you do really?” he asked, as the anecdote took a darker turn. “You change. I figured if I changed my faggot self, I could be in.”

He ultimately picked up acting, but admitted even growing up and moving on hadn’t fully quieted his inner struggle with his sexuality.

Until he was offered the role of Jesus Christ in the miniseries A.D. The Bible Continues.

“So there I am, hanging on the cross in Morocco, and I look up at the sky, and I think, ‘You could still strike me down with lightning. Are you sure you want me to play your son? Me?’

“I waited. Nothing happened. I was not struck by lightning. Instead, what I felt was an overwhelming feeling of love and acceptance and freedom that I could never even put into words,” he said. “A message from God? Maybe.”

The full TED Talk is an honest account of how learning to love yourself and be judgment free leads to telling better stories, something Di Pace had to spend time learning for himself, and something any LGBTQ person, creative or not, can almost definitely relate to.