Actor Chad Allen spoke to Clive Simmons about his MQFF film, Save Me, and playing a gay private eye in the Donald Strachey series.

“Acting gives me expression,” Chad Allen says, “It’s my artform; and it’s also the conversation I want to have with the world. It’s the method of transcendence for me.”

His face has launched hundreds of magazines and set the hearts of many men and women aflutter, but the boy from St. Elsewhere has long been on a spiritual quest, which he says, ultimately saved his life.

Born in 1974, Chad Lazzari was raised in “a pretty conservative Italian family” in Cerritos, a small town near Long Beach in California. Spotted at a county fair, he was placed in a McDonald’s commercial, before securing a small but pivotal role as Tommy Westphall, an autistic child, in the cutting-edge TV drama, St. Elsewhere.

“It was one of the great TV shows,” Allen says, “so ahead of its time in terms of the style of it, and the issues it tackled. Certainly in terms of AIDS, for example. When I got the role, I remember asking my mother what autism was, and she said that autistic kids lived in their own world. I understood that completely. I had this whole other world going on in my head. I’d follow the patterns on the walls, and in my head, there was this imaginary war going on between the shapes.”

After three further stints in TV sitcoms, Allen was cast opposite Jane Seymour in Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman, which became spectacularly successful. In the middle of the show’s six-year run, Allen was outed when The Globe, an American tabloid, published a photo of him kissing a man in a spa.

“I ended up sitting with producers and lawyers and they were all talking and I didn’t know what to do. They were saying ‘Do you want to do an interview with The Advocate? Do you want us to find you a girlfriend?’ They were prepared to try anything. I didn’t know what to do; what to say. It was outside my frame of reference, but I knew that I didn’t want to lie. I knew I didn’t have it in me to do that.”

Allen decided not to lie, but it fuelled headlines when he was cast as a missionary in the film, End of the Spear, which was based on a true story. “I got a call from my agent to go and read for the part, but when I discovered that the piece was being done by these predominantly conservative Christians, I got a little alarmed, and I went in and had a conversation with them about my being gay.

“But they said that they believed that I was the right person for it, and we were able to find common ground, which was good because there were a lot of death threats when it was released from all these people who were full of fear. But a lot of hearts were open to the intersection between Christianity and homosexuality, and I think we opened up a lot of doors. The conversation you and I are having is evidence of that consciousness. We are each of us in the process of transforming, and you don’t get to do that without struggle.”

I ask him how he got involved in the Donald Strachey series, in which he plays the titular gay private eye. “Paul Colichman of Here Films came to me a couple of years ago and said, ‘We have these films we’d like to do, and we want someone who is openly gay to do them.’ I read the books they were based on, and they were decent little mysteries, but I didn’t feel well-suited to them. He had this bizarre relationship with this man, but he was constantly having sex with strangers and I didn’t really care for that. So we reworked it, and we made it this intense, monogamous relationship, which was something I felt hadn’t been explored in that genre.”

In his latest film, Save Me, screening at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, Allen returns to the issue of gays and the reparative therapy movement which he explored in the first of the Strachey films. “I’m a deeply spiritual person, and working on Save Me provided me with the invitation to go deeper than I ever have in my relationship with God. I got in touch with a huge amount of shame which was rooted in my upbringing, and the idea that being gay was inherently wrong, and that it was a flaw in my being, rather than a gift.

“I’ve always felt that I had a deep relationship with God, but I had 12 years of Catholic school and there was a lot of small-mindedness there. Questioning was not encouraged, and I was a questioner. Seeking was not encouraged, and I was a seeker. That questioning led me on a journey to some interesting places, but it all led me to where I am right now, and the fact is, you can’t take one step without taking the step behind it.”

Save Me screens at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival on Saturday night. On The Other Hand, Death, the new Donald Strachey film, is available on DVD on March 23.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed