Murray Bartlett Praises Welcome to Chippendales Over Queer Intimacy

How queer intimacy has been portrayed on screen has been a complex, and often frustrating situation over the decades. That’s been shifting in recent years, with some LGBTQ+-inclusive movies and TV shows making obvious strides to treat intimacy the same, regardless of the genders of the people involved.

Actor Murray Bartlett recently spoke to Pink Newson the topic, praising his new show, Welcome to Chippendales, for how it approaches sex scenes between men.

“What I am interested in, and what I’m pleased to see, is the intimacy between queer characters and the evolution that we’re seeing,” he said. “We are seeing a real evolution of that in terms of those queer intimate scenes that are actually intimate.”

Bartlett seemed most focus on the importance of allowing queer characters to actually connect leading up to and during these moments, rather than simply the physicality of it all — something that has frequently been allowed between heterosexual pairings on screen, while queer characters often were either allowed intimacy or physicality, but rarely both.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing that we’re able to see that with all sorts of different characters,” he added. “Sometimes people in the community have difficulty kind of connecting with or identifying with [these characters]. But when we can find those sort of universal things that we all relate to, we realise that we’re all connected and not that different, essentially. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

Welcome to Chippendales is based on the true story of Steve Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), as he built up the titular male strip club before burning his own empire to the ground.