Gay Beginnings

September 15, 2012

Gay Beginnings

Prior to his superhero leading man role in the new CW series ‘Arrow’, Stephen Amell appeared in several gay-themed TV series.
His acting debut was playing a spinning instructor on Showtime’s gay drama, ‘Queer as Folk’ in 2004.
The hunky actor recounted his past in a recent interview with AfterElton.com:
“I had been acting for four months. I had never gotten a job yet, and I said to my agent, because I was a spinning instructor at the time, I said, ‘If I don’t get this job, I quit,’ figuring that me being a spinning instructor would be totally important. It wasn’t important at all, but I did get the job.”
The following year, he landed his first recurring role on another gay soap, ‘Dante’s Cove’, in which he appeared in only one season playing a straight character who oddly turned gay.
Amell recalled, “At first it was a horrible experience because we had a terrible director. They fired him. They brought on a really great guy. Then the following year they wanted to take the Adam character… he obviously was not straight any more.”
Then in 2011, he landed his highest-profile role playing a male gigolo, Jason, on Season 3 of HBO’s ‘Hung’, in which his character was set to expand his client base beyond women but got canceled before reaching season 4.
“One of the things that I liked on Hung, which we didn’t get a chance to explore in the fourth season, was Jason Does Dudes,” he said. “Male prostitution is part and parcel of the whole thing, and we didn’t get to explore that. But clearly we would have, and I would have been more than comfortable shooting that because it’s HBO, and it would have been real and that would have been that.”