Thomas Jane, the star of the HBO series
Hung, has denied he said he once worked the streets of Los
Angeles as a male prostitute.
Jane, who plays a struggling divorcee
and father of two teenagers moonlighting as a male prostitute to make
ends meet, suggested in an interview with The Los Angeles Times
that he once prostituted in real life.
“You know, when I was a kid out here
in L.A., I was homeless, I didn't have any money and I was living in
my car,” Jane told the Times. “I was 18. I wasn't averse
to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a
sandwich. Know what I mean?”
“Being a young artist and broke in
Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably
because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would
have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and
prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge
myself in that way.”
But in a interview with The
Fix, Jane says people misunderstood what he was saying.
“I never said I was a prostitute,”
Jane said. “I was talking about my [early] time in Hollywood: I
said that I'd had a sexually adventurous time and I was trying to
relate that to how I play a prostitute on TV – trying to relate my
experience to my character's experience – and well, people heard
what they wanted to hear. Things fly around.”
(Related: Thomas
Jane proud of gay role.)