If you were to hear an off-hand reference to “wood,” where would your head go? If you’re Luke Macfarlane, it goes to what else but actual woodworking.
A trailblazer at the Hallmark Channel for over a decade, Macfarlane has helped transform perceptions of the network by demonstrating that its “strong brand can still hold all these different voices,” as he told me recently. That includes the voice of Gay Man Working a Saw, a role he’s not here to embody, but one rooted in his true family history and personal experience of carpentry. In the new Hallmark+ reality series “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” Macfarlane puts his own special touch on old homes, maintaining their historical charm but gently restoring them in contemporary ways.
Beyond carpentry, Macfarlane has spent the last 20 years supporting authentic storytelling through acting projects like his role in the gay-inclusive ABC family drama “Brothers & Sisters,” which premiered in 2006 and ran for five seasons, and films like Billy Eichner’s “Bros” and the popular Netflix Christmas comedy “Single All the Way.” Since starring in Hallmark’s “The Memory Book” in 2014, he’s been a fan favorite on the network, where he’s played both straight and gay romantic leads.
With “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” he’s already looking forward to shooting more episodes beyond the six debut episodes now airing. Though there aren’t out LGBTQ+ couples featured during this batch, he says, “That is something we would love for the show. I mean, LGBTQ+ people do own homes.”
I’ve seen words like “dirty” and “wet” used to describe your presence on this show. And naturally, there’s been a fair number of wood references that aren’t just referring to lumber. As a gay carpenter, have you come to expect these kinds of jokes?
It is a vocabulary that lends itself well [to that]. I was lucky enough to be on “The Sherri Shepherd show,” and I wanted to demonstrate building something for her, and I built her this little box and the kinds of joints, they were not dovetail joints, as people sometimes incorrectly identify. They were tongue-and-slot joints, and as soon as I said, “You need to fit your tongue into the slot,” it just was pandemonium. And Sherri picked it up like that and I was like, “Oh my god, this is my biggest nightmare.” It’s something about the vocabulary.
As a carpenter, you’re thinking of carpentry. Actual wood.
I really am. Look, I appreciate innuendo as much as anybody, but no, it’s just a different vocabulary. It totally is. Every profession has a vocabulary. Most of my woodworking friends would not squirm at “tongue and slot.”
For you, what’s the significance of being an out gay person on Hallmark?
Well, it’s really interesting because I think my first movie for Hallmark was over 10 years ago and it had this reputation that I never really totally agreed with. People were like, “Hallmark is white and heterosexual and Christian.” Hallmark is not that. And I am one piece of the evidence that we are not that and that Hallmark is a big tent.
There’s room for our stories and those stories can still fit inside the brand of Hallmark, which has a really strong sense of identity, and I would say a stronger sense of identity than almost most network brands. You kind of know what you’re going to get when you get a Hallmark movie and the amazing thing is you know what you’re going to get when you watch a Hallmark movie, but you’re also going to get gay and you’re also going to get all the other colors too. So it is comforting to know that this strong brand can still hold all these different voices.
It’s exciting for me to come to understand Hallmark in this way. Growing up as a gay kid, it felt like it wasn’t a channel where I could find people who were like me.
Look, we all know that “Saturday Night Live” skit, and I could probably repeat the entire thing verbatim, so I know it very well, but I don’t think it’s actually accurate and bless ’em for continuing to grow with me. They hired me when I was an [out] gay actor. I was coming off of “Brothers & Sisters.” There was no line about who I was. There was no pretending. There was no double-reverse reveal.
On my mind right now is what’s happening in the U.S. politically and the importance of authentic representation. What do you feel you can offer to both this generation of young queer people and the broader public by, perhaps, reaching across the aisle through your work and by being a public figure?
It’s hard to know how to even begin to answer that question, but I want to start by saying [that I reach people through] good design. I’m getting very emotional. For some reason, it’s hard.
I’m sorry, Luke.
No, it’s OK. So good design. Good design is about listening. You don’t come in with an idea about what’s good and bad. Very few designers have that privilege of like, “I’m going to design you a house that looks exactly like what I think good designers do.” Who are you? What do you value? What is important to you? Where do you come from? Where do you live? How do you live? And then we adapt and we make something for them that’s special. And that doesn’t mean I erase myself in the process. We begin to have a conversation and I do feel like the conversation we’re having in politics right now is, this is what’s correct. This is what’s right. This is what I’m going to impose upon you.
And just to get maybe a little more political than anybody wants me to get, I’m fascinated by the idea that Donald Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center. This just boggles my mind, but specifically I wanted to talk about the comment that he had about the facade of the Kennedy Center. The architect was working in the international style at a time and out front you have slender columns. So many designers at that point were trying to redefine this sort of Greek and Roman nomenclature and Corinthian, Ionic columns.
So [Donald Trump] says, “I’m going to build these slender steel columns.” And I was fascinated listening to Trump talk about them as if they were incomplete. [He] was talking about them as if they had never bothered to wrap them in marble because he thought a building that has meaning needs to have marble columns out front. And again, this is just to further this idea that design is not about imposing your idea on somebody else. It’s about thinking about different ways of interacting with the world and hearing different people’s ideas of things.
I wanted to bounce back to 2006 and tell you that I have fond memories of watching every episode of “Brothers & Sisters” with my mother. Scotty and Kevin’s relationship really helped me see a future for myself as a gay man. How do you reflect on that show’s contributions to the conversation around visibility?
Gosh, it was such a different time. Proposition 8 was being debated in California during the filming of that show, and marriage equality had not yet been fermented. And so it is amazing to think of it as a very different time. It was also a very different time in that I [was] less aware of the broader world. We didn’t have Instagram back then. I was not on social media. It was harder to see the impact you were having on people.
I remember years after the show finished, this kid called me… I shouldn’t call him a kid. He was getting his PhD and he was looking at queer representation in media and he wanted to talk to me for his thesis. And I was just baffled that it had reached people in that way. So I’m incredibly proud of that. But I will also say we were just going day by day, and we were telling the stories of the writers and the people I knew and [feeling] just blessed that it connected. The number of stories of young gay men watching with their mothers was pretty profound. I heard that a lot, because good art is the beginning of a conversation, like I was saying before, and what better way to begin a conversation than by seeing Sally Field love her gay son?
I still defend that “Bros” really deserved a bigger audience. What do you think or hope the legacy of that movie will be as time passes?
It just is really funny and I think it will always be funny. I mean, comedy is such an interesting thing. I feel comedy as an art form is the most susceptible to time being unkind, but I don’t know what it is. I think that movie is going to be funny forever. I think Billy Eichner is brilliant and he brought so much of himself to that movie in such a fearless way. So I hope that it kind stays up there in the Judd Apatow collection of movies like “Bridesmaids” and “Train Wreck,” as movies that people will return to. So I’m really proud of that movie.
And what about “Single All the Way”?
“Single All the Way” was fascinating. You never know when movies are going to connect with people so deeply. We filmed that in the height of Covid and I never imagined that movie would resonate with people so much. It was also a testament to new media and how, with Netflix, you put a movie out there that people in a moment all want to watch and bam, it happens so quickly.
It’s been a couple of years since “Notes of Autumn” came out in 2023, during which you played half of a gay couple. Will we see you return to Hallmark in another gay role?
I certainly hope so. It’s actually something that I’m really committed to now, sort of trying to work with Hallmark as not just an actor, but also as a producer. So I’ve been developing a script with a dear friend — actually, a dear friend that I met on my “Brothers & Sisters” days — to tell a Christmas LGBTQ+ story. So stay tuned. We’re in development, as I say, but it’s something I would very much like to do.
