Perry unhappy to be just friends

I'm really happy with this film, it's a great part for me and really fun to play.

It's so weird because you just don't know when you make a film. It's always such a gamble but when I saw this, it just worked. The funny thing is that about four years ago I was offered this movie and it just didn't work. You know, it was kind of silly and it just didn't work for me and then two years ago I got sent the same script and I called my manager and said, "Look, I turned it down. I'm not that desperate to do a movie or take a summer off, go away with this thing." So he said, "Well, there has been a major rewrite, read it again" and I did and I got to the end and I said, "Well, this is good."

They made it much more adult and they made it smarter and what it ended up being - in terms of just a thematic comparison - was something which reminded me of Tootsie. At the end of that, Dustin Hoffman has a line where he says to Jessica Lange, "I was a better man as a woman with you than I ever was as a man with a woman." That theme is great and it's a really neat thing to explore. And that is sort of what is explored here because my character's caught up in this situation where he has to pretend that he's gay for business, and to keep this friendship going with this girl that he really likes and is falling in love with. They're able to drop all that crap, that boy crap of trying to get the girl into bed and trying to impress her, and just really talk to each other and get to know each other. Ultimately, of course, they fall in love and I really liked that dynamic and that was much more set up in this last draft of the script I read. And then Neve Campbell was attached to it which obviously made the whole thing more attractive.

I wasn't nervous about the gay thing at all because we did kind of a version of this on Friends the first year, which was one of the best episodes actually. I think people are a lot more open to all that stuff nowadays. It's a very contemporary movie but it was definitely strange showing up the day we filmed the big ceremony for Gay Man Of The Year, which I won. We were very careful too not to offend anyone with anything in this movie so I really hope we don't.