Ryan Phillippe thought his religious parents would disown him after taking gay roles and Cruel Intentions
Cruel Intentions star Ryan Phillippe has revealed he feared his parents would disown him
Cruel Intentions star Ryan Phillippe has revealed he feared his parents would disown him after taking on the film.
Phillippe, who played the manipulative wealthy teen Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions, reflected to Barstool Sports’ KFC Radio podcast that his parents were already furious for him with his role as gay teen Billy Douglas on the TV soap One Life to Live when he took on Cruel Intentions.
Cruel Intentions star Ryan Phillippe feared his parents would disown him.
He said: “I thought my parents were going to disown me… I had grown up going to, like, Baptist school and Christian school.
“My first role, coming out of the Christian school, when I was a senior in high school, I played the first gay character on a soap opera, first gay teenager ever, and so I was shunned at that point, so they were already out of the picture.
“I mean this was 1992, and I was playing a gay teenager and I was in a Christian school. They weren’t happy about it.”
Actor Ryan Phillippe (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Phillipe also spoke about reading the script for Cruel Intentions for the first time on the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
He said: “I remember walking out the trailer and finding [the producer]. I’m like, ‘Are you guys really going to make this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And I was, you know… I’ve still never played a character like that since.
“I want to get back to playing a character like Sebastian in Cruel Intentions. It was just so fun to be so flippant and theatrical. It’s cool that it holds up, a lot of times you take a movie from a specific point in time and it stays, but this movie somehow finds new fans all the time.
“There’s a musical out there, that’s really good. They put it back in theatres for its 25th anniversary!”
Cruel Intentions credited with a million queer awakenings.
Phillippe has previously spoken out about how his nude scene in Cruel Intentions is often touted by men on Twitter who said seeing it made them realise they were gay.
He said: “So many guys on Twitter are like, ‘That’s the moment I knew I was gay,'” he continued, “and there have been guys like, ‘I behaved like Sebastian to get laid!'”
Demi Lovato has credited her own queer awakening to the film’s the famous kiss between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair.
She said last month: “It was definitely when I was young and I should not have been watching Cruel Intentions, but I did.
“It was that scene where they made out on the park lawn, and I was just like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I really like that!’
“I was like, ‘I want to try it!’ And then, when I was 17, I did get down with that. And that’s when I knew.”
