Murray Bartlett covers the July issue
of UK LGBT glossy Attitude.
The openly gay 48-year-old Bartlett is
best known for playing Dominic “Dom” Basaluzzo in the HBO dramedy
Looking. He plays Michael “Mouse” Tolliver in the upcoming
Netflix adaptation of Tales of the City.
Netflix's 10-episode limited series is
set in present-day San Francisco as Mary Ann Singleton (played by
Laura Linney) returns to the boarding house run by Anna Madrigal
(Olympia Dukakis) at 28 Barbary Lane. The premise appears to follow
author Armistead Maupin's eighth novel in the series, Mary Ann in
Autumn.
While Bartlett is the third actor to
play Mouse, he told Attitude that he didn't “think that much
about the previous TV representations of Mouse.” Instead, he read
all of the books for inspiration on how to play the character.
“I have so much love for Tales of
the City,” Bartlett
said. “It’s something very special and kind of profound, I
guess, to me and to a lot of people, because it [originally] came at
a time when there weren’t many – if any – characters and shows
that were such a celebration of being openly gay and being yourself."
Bartlett added that Tales of the
City spoke to him about community.
“It's a beautiful statement about
what community can be and how diverse it can be, in terms of age,
sexuality and gender identity.”
“That’s something that we should
all be aware of as human beings, regardless of our sexual preference
or our gender identity,” he said. "Perhaps if we had more of a
sense of family as a human race we wouldn’t be fucking everything
up..."
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City
arrives on Netflix June 7.