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.