Nathan Lane recalls how Robin Williams protected him from being outed: ‘He was a saint’
Nathan Lane said Robin Williams ‘ protected’ him during an Oprah appearance. (MGM/UA Distribution Co.)
Nathan Lane has shared the heartwarming story of how the late Robin Williams supported him when he wasn’t ready to publicly come out as gay.
Lane, who starred alongside Williams in The Birdcage, is now openly gay – but was “not prepared at all” to answer questions about his sexuality when the pair appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show during the press tour in 1996.
Directed by the late Mike Nichols (The Graduate), the beloved comedy follows Lane and Williams as a gay couple who attempt to set up a marriage between their son (Dan Futterman) and a young woman with very conservative parents (Calista Flockhart, Dianne West and Gene Hackman).
Although Lane played a gay character in the film, he wasn’t out of the closet at the time. During an episode of Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist on NBC, the actor recalled how his friend and co-star, who died by suicide in 2014, helped deflect questions around his sexuality when the pair appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Before the show, Lane revealed how he confided in Williams about not wanting to answer questions about that topic, and how the actor vowed to protect him from scrutiny.
“I don’t think Oprah was trying to out me, but I said to Robin beforehand: ‘I’m not prepared. I’m so scared of going out there and talking to Oprah. I’m not prepared to discuss that I’m gay on national television, I’m not ready,’ ” Lane recalls in a clip from the episode.
“And he said, ‘Oh, it’s alright, don’t worry about it, we don’t have to talk about it, we won’t talk about it.'”
During the original interview, Winfrey asks: “Are you or are you not [gay]? Is he?”. Williams then injects to protect Lane’s privacy, putting on a ‘Nineties gay accent’ and mimicking the host’s question: “Is he, honey? I don’t know.”
This tracks with Lane’s description of how Williams “swoops in and diverts Oprah, goes off on a tangent and protects me,” adding that he “was a saint”.
The distraction gave Lane enough time to come up with an answer for Oprah, saying he was simply an actor with without “an image to uphold”.
While Lane called the questions “unavoidable because of the nature of the film and character”, he emphasised that he “certainly wasn’t ready to go from table-to-table and tell them all I was gay” – although he doesn’t believe Oprah was trying to out him.
“I just wasn’t ready to do that, to make this whole thing… the public side of it, the celebrity side,” he continued. “‘Oh, now you’re a public figure and you have to make some sort of public statement about it.’ I was terrified. I wasn’t ready to do that.”
Lane went on to acknowledge the progress that has been made with LGBTQ+ acceptance since he came out.
“It’s great that everyone now feels comfortable, but homophobia is alive and well, and there are plenty of gay people who are still hiding.”
Lane, who received a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The Birdcage, publicly came out as gay in a 1999 interview with The Advocate, not long after the murder of gay American student Matthew Shepard in 1998. He went on to marry his longtime partner, the playwright and producer Devlin Elliott, in 2015.
He recently won an Emmy for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series for his role in Only Murders in the Building, and will next be seen in Ari Aster’s upcoming A24 surrealist comedy horror Beau Is Afraid.
