The Canadian comedian discusses prostate play, Hollywood homophobia and his role as Buddy Cole.
Boys just can’t resist pushing their own buttons, Scott Thompson says. Or, as he puts it more bluntly, “There must a be a reason for men having a clitoris in their asshole.”
Only moments earlier, Thompson—the thoroughly Canadian funnyman best known as one of five members of the thoroughly Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall—was musing about the possibility of him playing Queen Elizabeth in a future season of The Queen. Quite suddenly, though, he’s shifted gears to pegging and the evolutionary significance of prostate play.
“For me, it just makes me think there must be a place for male homosexuals,” says Thompson by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “And not only that, there must be a reason why males can get sexual pleasure through the anus. I think it’s fascinating that people—that men—are so afraid of being homosexual that they won’t even explore their own body’s erotic potential because of homophobia. That shows how powerful it is.”
The 58-year-old actor and comedian is a bottomless well of this stuff. Having portrayed one of the most memorable gay characters to ever appear on pre-Will & Grace TV—and doing so as an out and proud gay man himself—Thompson has confronted homophobia and its long-lasting effects throughout his entire career.
In 1988, a pilot aired for his comedy troupe’s titular sketch show, The Kids in the Hall, introducing viewers to Thompson, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney. It would debut as a regular series the following year, broadcast and co-produced by HBO and the CBC. Seemingly out of nowhere came a show that was almost frightening in its newness; five Canadian guys, discovered in Toronto by Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels, doing skits spoofing secretaries, senior citizens, businessmen and various iterations of the devil. They blew apart gender conventions by frequently appearing in drag, and even kissing each other on the lips. It was, in many ways, totally revolutionary—comedy as activism.
“I was completely aware that coming out as I did and starting a career as a gay man … was foolhardy. But I also knew that no one else was going to do it.”
Nowhere was that spirit more obvious than in the last few minutes of the show’s pilot episode, when the world was introduced to Buddy Cole, Thompson’s avatar of flaming, glittering gayness. An ultra-campy, trash-talking queen in an ascot, Buddy perched on a barstool sipping a martini. Between long drags from his cigarette, his monologue moved seamlessly with louche irreverence (and plenty of duckface) from Kubla Kahn to Moliére to sharting, and even dropped what would be the first of many F-bombs: “faggot.” As Buddy, Thompson spat out “hetero” like a bad word but called himself a fag with glee.
I knew that what I was doing was unheard of,” recounts Thompson. “I was completely aware that coming out as I did and starting a career as a gay man, especially at the height of the AIDS epidemic, was foolhardy. But I also knew that no one else was going to do it. And so, I like to be first.”
For younger viewers especially, Thompson-as-Buddy was a breath of fresh air—or at least as fresh as could be expected inside the dingy gay bar from which Buddy held court. He was making fun of our parents—those lame, boring breeders—while he was the dazzling superstar. His monologues had hillbilly kids like me laughing too hard to realize they were siding with one of those dreaded queers until, all of a sudden, the unfamiliar became familiar, even inspirational. In interviews, Thompson has described Buddy as a “macho queen,” “effeminate but ballsy” and an “alpha fag.” He was all of that and more, shooting like a comet from sleepy old Canada.
He knew that bursting out out of the closet on TV would affect his career, but he didn’t consider how long those effects might last. Thompson recalls that before the pilot was filmed, Lorne Michaels sat him down and told him that he didn’t have to be openly gay. “‘Not that you shouldn’t, but if you do it’s going to affect your career. If you don’t, you’ll have a wonderful career,’” Thompson remembers him saying.
While Thompson’s career certainly has its highlights—he was nominated for three Emmys during Kids’ six-year run, and he followed that up with a recurring role on The Larry Sanders Show—he hasn’t attained the stardom of some of his SNL cousins. Rather than headlining marquee comedies like Mike Myers and Dan Aykroyd (outside of the Kids’ own feature film, Brain Candy) Thompson fell into doing a series of small or one-off parts in everything from Touched by an Angel to Star Trek: Voyager. He voiced Grady, Homer’s one-time gay roommate, for three episodes on The Simpsons, and more recently played Jimmy Price, a straight-laced crime scene investigator, on the cult favorite Hannibal. But headlining roles never came.
“I really believe that I would have had a much different career if I had stayed in the closet.”
In fact, none of the Kids—successful and beloved by fans as they are—have become major stars. Thompson is pretty sure he knows why.
“Even though they’re straight white guys, they still didn’t quite get what their peers got,” Thompson says. “Even though they weren’t gay, the world saw them as gay, so they went through it. And I love them for that. I knew what I was doing. Or at least, I deserved what I got, because that was my burden. But they didn’t—you know what I mean?”
Indeed, Kids in the Hall was the gayest thing TV had ever seen at that point—and that was at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Beyond Buddy Cole, the show featured Mark McKinney as a gay predatory vampire trying to solicit a blowjob from Thompson’s clueless hoser. There was a skit called “Running Faggot” that depicted Thompson as a good Samaritan Davy Crockett type. By today’s standards, those may not have been the most uplifting depictions of LGBT characters, but the Kids weren’t trying to be charitable. They broke the rules, and they paid for it.
Thompson has found that Lorne Michaels’ dire prediction has come true, but that has only galvanized him further. “I didn’t understand how deep homophobia was. I didn’t quite understand how it affects everything. And I really believe that I would have had a much different career if I had stayed in the closet. I believe I would have had a better career on television. I probably would have been in movies. I would have been seen as a performer who could do anything rather than an openly gay guy that we can use to show our credentials.”
Insouciant, he adds: “That’s the thing about not quite making it, which is the thing that all the Kids have in common. Unlike the vast majority of our peers that went on to superstar careers, we’re all still hungry.”
“I want to play fathers. I want to play mothers. I want to play everyone.”
So, where’s a hungry, middle-aged comedic genius to go? He’s taking the stage and doing stand-up, a longtime fear for an actor who has seemed more than comfortable in front of an audience. And he wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t for cancer.
It was 2009 when he received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He was living in LA at the time, so he moved home to Canada for better healthcare. “During that period, when I got really ill, I made a vow to myself that when I got better, I would become a stand-up comedian. I figured I really had nothing to be afraid of any longer. Maybe I’m going to live for a while—why not take on something that already terrifies me? And suddenly, I wasn’t afraid of the audience not liking me. I just thought, well, this is a new challenge.”
Thompson remained in Canada for a while to hone his stand-up chops. “Canadian show business is so lame,” he says. “I just decided I would reinvent myself, and then, when I was ready, I would come back to LA and show off.”
Now he’s back in California, footloose and cancer-free—and single. Some of the material he’s mined for his upcoming comedy album concerns the rampant ageism of the gay scene. But shouldn’t fame outweigh his age, as it does with most celebrities?
“Fame doesn’t work for gay men,” he says, realizing that he’s getting into controversial territory. “Gay men are attracted to looks and youth. In the gay world, a guy with a big dick is much more powerful and important than—I was going to say me, but then I have a big dick, so.”
He adds with a laugh, “Of course, there are gold diggers in the gay community—and I’m trying to find them.”
While he continues that search, Thompson will release his first comedy album, Not a Fan, this summer. On top of that, he’s touring a new Buddy Cole show across America and getting ready to branch out with his acting. He’s done comedy, he’s played the gay best friend. Now he wants more. “I want to play a womanizer. I want to play a psychopath. I want to play a guy who goes to his job every day. I want to play fathers. I want to play mothers,” Thompson says. “I want to play everyone.”
The world should be ready for him this time around.