Actor Tituss Burgess says he “despises”
the stereotypical gay best friend character.
Burgess won an Emmy nomination for
playing Titus Andromedon on the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy
Schmidt. On the show, comedy
ensues when Kimmy decides to live in New York after spending 15 years
trapped in an Indiana bunker.
The 36-year-old
openly gay Burgess plays Kimmy's eccentric roommate.
Speaking with The
New York Times, Burgess said that he was pleased that the show's
producers – Tina Fey and Robert Carlock – made his character
“three-dimensional.”
“They made him
three-dimensional, and he wasn't just the stereotypical gay best
friend – I despise that and I had no interest in playing that,”
Burgess said
“If it's Tina and
Robert, I can trust that Titus is going to be a human being who
happens to be gay, who happens to be an actor, who happens to be down
on his luck, and all of these things are happenstance and not the
thing that we focus on. Rather we focus on this unlikely
partnership, this unlikely friendship between he and Kimmy,” he
added.