You know Harry Hamlin from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and you also know that he's acted in quite a few films throughout his decades-long career.
Hamlin also starred in the 1982 drama Making Love, which was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to respectfully portray male homosexuality.
Today, Making Love is regarded as a landmark in terms of queer representation in Hollywood cinema — but at the time, audiences and critics rejected the film. In an interview with People, Hamlin talked about how starring in it affected his career.
Hamlin claims that the role effectively "ended" his career as an actor. "For years, I'd think was that the reason why I stopped getting calls? And finally realized that was the last time I ever did a movie for a studio," he says.
"I've done independent films but never a studio film. I had been doing nothing but studio films and basically going out on all the castings for all the movies. That stopped completely."
Hamlin says that he'd been told that taking the role was a risk too — with many close to him urging to turn it down. "I think it had been offered to pretty much everybody in town and everyone had turned it down because they thought it might be damaging to their careers."
"I didn't see it that way," he continued. "I was looking for something serious and something meaningful, rather than doing a movie about vampire bats invading a small town in the Midwest, which is the type of fare I was being offered at the time."
And to this day, Hamlin is "very proud" of Making Love, even as he acknowledges that it didn't get its due praise upon release. "It never really got the attention that I think it probably deserves, given the time in which it was released," he said.
