Even though I was gay or going to be gay or didn’t know I was gay, whatever it was, I still connected to them as people who loved each other and went through things like this very, very deeply. “I don’t even say this to claim I had an issue with that-in fact, kinda the opposite.

There are many things about this project that I was drawn to because it did echo for me-in different ways and forms-a lot of the movies I grew up knowing and loving, and those almost always were about straight couples. I don’t think that I saw it coming until we were doing it, but I felt I was getting a chance to partake in scenes as an actor that I never fully dreamed I would be a part of. As a participant, Parsons agrees: “The effort-quote, unquote-was so joyful that I would say, ‘Yes, it was easy.’ It’s where the joy really was for me. Indeed, Spiewak confronted Ausiello with just such a proposal at the Q&A-and a film was born.Īs directed by Michael Showalter, the love scenes between the two men are beautifully natural, underplayed, almost effortlessly. His husband, producer Todd Spiewak, found him sobbing in their living room-and felt if he had such a strong emotional reaction to the story, maybe it should be optioned for the movies. Reading the book in preparation for that bookstore Q&A was what opened Parsons’ eyes and filled them with tears.

It’s not really part of the movie, but it was part of my experience with him.” You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes that may be informing their day. “You never know what’s going on with somebody else, completely. “I knew Michael, obviously, from being interviewed by him, but I had no idea this was going on in his life,” Parsons says. Since Ausiello covered television for TV Guide, TV Line and Entertainment Weekly, the two crossed paths many times while Parsons was raking in Emmys (4) and racking up years (13) via The Big Bang Theory. When his memoir was released in 2017, he knew exactly who should moderate a Q&A at a Barnes & Noble in L.A.: Jim Parsons. The aptly titled Spoiler Alert, which has settled into Manhattan movie houses for a while, begins with the final gasp of a gay relationship between Michael Ausiello (Jim Parsons) and Kit Cowan (Ben Aldridge), then flashbacks non-chronologically across their recent past-from meeting-cute to courtship to love-in-full-bloom to marriage and to the unmovable roadblock: terminal cancer.īeing a writer, Ausiello put all the above on paper, chronicling the ordeal and getting it published as a book, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies.

Michael ausiello books