Ryan O’Connell to star in movie adaptation of debut novel: ‘I’m working with Greg Berlanti on it’

Words: Jamie Tabberer; picture: Leigh Kelly

“Oh my god, did we have a one-night stand?!” Well, we at least rubbed shoulders. It turns out Attitude and Ryan O’Connell used to frequent the same grimy London LGBTQ bar back in 2010: the legendary, since-closed Joiners’ Arms.
 
“It’s a blurry time!” recalls the 34-year-old of his stint in The Big Smoke as a baby gay. Fast-forward 12 years, and two series of self-penned Netflix show Special, and the actor-screenwriter extraordinaire has a duel career as a novelist: Just by Looking at Him is out now.

The story of a restless TV writer, Elliott, who sabotages his relationship with the lovable Gus for no good reason, Just by Looking at Him is led by an impossible-to-ignore strapline: “My boyfriend has a perfect penis. But, even with the best love, you can still wake up next to a beautiful man with a beautiful penis and be bored.” That’s the tea.

“We sold the screenplay and novel rights simultaneously” says Ryan of Just By Looking At Him (Picture by Aaron Jay Young)

“Intimacy issues 101 [basically],” laughs Ryan. He says of his own relationship history: “I’d date people for two, three months then sabotage. ‘Intruder, intruder, intruder! Revolt, revolt, revolt!’ But, looking back, it’s also true that the men I was dating were not the right ones. There wasn’t a strong connection.”

Ryan met now-boyfriend Jonathan Parks-Ramage eight years ago – famously, at a Grimes-hosted party. “He was so special and unique,” says Ryan. “I knew if I fucked this up, it would truly be my intimacy issues and not him.”

Although this interviewer initially mistook Just by Looking at Him for autofiction, it is definitely, definitely a novel. “I am drawn to personal material, but doing work that on the surface seems to resemble your life – I think there’s a certain [assumption] that it’s your diary,” clarifies Ryan. “It’s not. Special, my show, was not really autobiographical, to be honest. Different character, different world. But that and the book [are] emotionally autobiographical, even if the stories and relationships depicted are completely fictional.”

“There are myriad ways to get sober”

That said, Ryan, like Elliott, is open about his issues with alcohol, and the California-born star last year celebrated one year of sobriety. What is Ryan’s message to readers going through something similar, based on his lived experience? “There are myriad ways to get sober,” he says. “I didn’t know that. I thought there were two options: the AA/12-step programme – which a lot of my friends have done, it saved their lives; we stan AA, OK? The other is: quit cold turkey, and you’re what’s called a dry drunk. So, someone who is sober but hasn’t dealt with the reasons why they drink.

“[But] what changed my life was reading these books back-to-back: This Naked Mind by Annie Grace and Quit Drinking Without Willpower by Allen Carr. It blew my mind, and articulated alcohol’s chokehold on society. And how it works on the brain, how you become emotionally dependant on it very quickly, and the emotional sometimes turns into the physical. I was grateful to those books. There are different pathways, and one isn’t less valid than the other.”

It was so surreal to have her play my mom” says Ryan of Queer As Folk co-star Kim Cattrall (Picture: Aaron Jay Young)

Like Ryan, Elliott is also living with cerebral palsy, and often experiences microaggressions over his disability. “When I write about that stuff, I always think: ‘That hasn’t happened to me in a while. Am I milking this? Dining out on past experiences?’ Without fail, something crazy will happen to me the next day. It’s putting a curse on myself.

“Two weeks ago, I was waiting for my boyfriend in front on Walgeens. A woman came up and said, point blank: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ We’re still here ladies and gentlemen. I was walking to dinner a couple of months ago and a car pulled up and asked if I needed to go to hospital. I was like: ‘I’m good.’

“It’s an interesting kind of microaggression. Well, the lady who said: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ was raised in a barn, clearly. But it can be well-intentioned, not coming from a malicious space. But it’s offensive to assume disabled people need something, to assert yourself in their lives without consent. It’s a dehumanising, destabilising experience. It coddles and infantilises us, takes away our agency.”

“It’s offensive to assume disabled people need something,” says Ryan of microaggressions he encounters over his disability (Image by Leigh Keily for Attitude)

Ryan’s powerful sense of agency is taking him to the heights of Hollywood: a film adaptation of Just by Looking at Him, in which he will star, is in the works. “I’m working on it with Greg Berlanti [who’s producing]” says Ryan of the Riverdale and Love, Simon filmmaking titan. “But I’m writing the screenplay.”

“We sold the screenplay and novel rights simultaneously,” he explains. “There was a period when I was doing edits on the novel while outlining the movie. Now that was crazy! The book wasn’t done! It was emotional whiplash: ‘Is that in the book? Is that in the movie?’”

The screenplay is now “finished and we’re trucking along. We’ll hopefully start shooting in the summer.”

For now, Ryan has his main role in Peacock’s Queer as Folk reboot – indeed, he’s currently appearing on the cover of Attitude alongside his co-stars – on which Sex and the City icon Kim Cattrall plays his mother. “It was amazing,” he says of Kim. “It was so surreal to have her play my mom. She’s so fucking cool, smart, and funny!”

Ryan names SATC as one of the shows he’d take to a desert island. “Popular, Ryan Murphy’s first show from the late 90s. A bizarre mix of teen drama infused with this gay, John Waters-esque camp. Its queer sensibility made me realise I was gay. My So-Called Life – one of the best shows about adolescence I’ve ever seen. Then… it’s a cross between The Comeback and the basic bitch in me wants to say Sex and the City.”

One show he doesn’t watch, though (“you’re going to send me to jail, literally”) is RuPaul’s Drag Race. “Honey, I’m not trying to be shady. It’s one of those things I’ve just missed. I’m so embarrassed!”
 
Ryan O’Connell’s debut novel Just by Looking at Him is out now (£16.99, Sphere). Queer as Folk is streaming on Peackock in the US and on Starzplay in the UK. 

The Attitude July/August issue featuring exclusive interviews the cast of Queer As Folk, including Ryan, is out now.