In 2001, Ricamora played a low-level professional tennis tournament in North Carolina, where he remembers feeling “super lonely” after playing on his college team for years. That feeling kept nagging at him, even on the court. The “electricity” he felt when he performed that monologue-which struck a chord with his own feelings about his mother, who left his father when Ricamora was seven months old-is something he has been chasing for the better part of the last two decades. Still, the actor had a range of other interests: he majored in psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, which he attended on a tennis scholarship, and, during his junior year, took an acting class where he was assigned a monologue from Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky,” about a young man looking to connect with his estranged father. “I love that you have to figure it all out on your own: there are no substitutions, there’s no coaching while you’re playing the match,” says Ricamora, who dreamed of winning Grand Slams of his own while in college. Born in Santa Maria, California, Ricamora moved frequently with his Filipino-born father, who was in the Air Force, and his stepmother before settling in the predominantly white town of Niceville, Florida, where he channeled his frustrations about being bullied for his ethnicity into becoming a high-level tennis player. Why the fuck not?”īeing cast in Fire Island, which centers the lived experiences of queer Asian Americans, was an all-time career highlight for Ricamora, who didn’t always aspire to become an actor or take pride in the many intersections of his identity. “I think it’s a huge indictment on this industry that this is the first time Conrad Ricamora is playing a romantic lead, because he’s so good at it, and it’s effortless and natural to him that I hope this is the launching pad for him to be the next Matthew McConaughey. “It was very easy to fall in love with Conrad every day,” adds Booster. I loved how Conrad, as an actor, is pulling something off that is almost impossible, which is that you have to get audiences to hate you at the beginning and then 100 percent love you by the end.” “There was this power play that really felt like Lizzie and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and very quickly we knew he was the right one. “I remember we brought in for a chemistry read with Joel, and he was the only actor to fluster Joel,” says Andrew Ahn, the director of Fire Island. Darcy), whose wealthy social circle looks down on Noah, Howie, and their eccentric group of friends. While helping Howie make a move on an endearing pediatrician named Charlie (James Scully), Noah develops feelings for Charlie’s best friend, Will (Ricamora, as a reimagined Mr. But after learning their friend, Erin (Margaret Cho), is planning to sell the place they consider a second home, the friends are forced to make the most of what could be their last summer together on the island. Written by Joel Kim Booster and inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Fire Island follows two best friends, Noah (Booster) and Howie (Bowen Yang), who flock to the gay haven every summer with their friends: Luke (Matt Rogers), Keegan (Tomás Matos) and Max (Torian Miller). But they were like, ‘No, we want you to audition for this.’” “Honestly, I was surprised they wanted another Asian American man for the male lead, which is sad, but that’s been my experience,” Ricamora tells W over Zoom a couple of days before wrapping his four-month run as Seymour in the off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors. When Conrad Ricamora received the audition for Fire Island, the groundbreaking gay rom-com set on an island off the south shore of Long Island, the actor thought producers had made a mistake.
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