Oh Mary! star Conrad Ricamora opens up about making space for Asian men to be real, flawed… and sexy

Conrad Ricamora has had a bumper year. The actor, who became known globally as one half of the 2010s most-shipped gay couple ‘Coliver’ in ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder (Ricamora as bashful IT maven Oliver, Jack Falahee as libidinous law student Connor), has spent much of the past 18 months playing a president on stage.

Not just any president; president Abraham Lincoln. And not just any stage; on Broadway, in Cole Escola’s farce Oh, Mary!, the buzziest show of 2025, now with a rotating cast so starry it would make the West End’s 2:22 green with envy.

Oh, and this summer? He spent it filming the sequel to a little-known Meryl Streep comedy by the name of The Devil Wears Prada. “Oh, gosh. It’s been so crazy. I’m still processing it,” Ricamora smiles, staring out of a hotel window at a gothically gloomy Edinburgh, where he arrived just hours ago from the US. “It’s just been so busy.”

Among the chaos, Ricamora bagged his first Tony award nomination. He was a “hoot” in Oh, Mary! as the long-suffering, closeted husband to the booze-bingeing has-been cabaret star Mary Todd Lincoln.

It was a historic Tony season: Escola was the first non-binary person to win Best Actor in a Play; Ricamora only the second/third ever Asian-American man to get a nom for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play (the accolade was won by Chinese-American actor Francis Jue, who joined Ricamora in the historic feat).

Even more groundbreaking was Glee’s Darren Criss, who became the first Asian-American man to win Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for his role in Maybe Happy Ending. It’s one reason why a few weeks later, when producers decided to hire white actor Andrew Barth Feldman to step into Criss’s role at the end of his stint, Ricamora and his fellow Asian-American performers found it so “upsetting”.

“It really made no sense”

“I loved Maybe Happy Ending so much when I saw it,” Ricamora says today. The show had been praised for its almost exclusively Asian cast, “and for that to be flipped, when we’re already lacking so much representation and especially for a show that’s set in Korea, I just… it really made no sense. It felt like we were stepping back into, like, the ‘90s with Jonathan Price playing The Engineer in Miss Saigon and these horribly racist tropes from, like, Anything Goes,” he laughs, in disbelief. “It just felt like this was in that vein of erasure and diminution.”

A raft of Asian stars, including Constance Wu, spoke out about the decision, with the show’s writers issuing a defence. Yet Ricamora, struck by the “pain of watching history repeat itself”, took action, launching a scholarship fund to support Asian-American actors in training. He started ‘The Right To Be There’ with $5000 and matched the first $10,000 raised; currently, it’s at almost $70,000.

On 13 October, he makes his West End debut performing in RepresentAsian, a night brimming with Asian musical theatre talent and hosted by EastEnders’ Nina Wadia, raising cash for The Boury Academy, which supports young Asian actors into training in the UK.

“I want them to see what I didn’t see when I was growing up,” he says of those coming. “I think my life overall would have been easier if I had been able to see myself on stage.”

Ricamora didn’t plan to be an actor. He spent his childhood in US air force bases across the country, where his Filipino-American father worked, and didn’t know theatre existed until he was 20 (he is now, I write incredulously, 46).

He performed for the first time during his freshman year at Queens University, North Carolina, and his father and step-mother were more surprised when he said he wanted to be an actor than when he came out as gay. “I wasn’t fooling him on that front,” he grins. “Then I wanted to be an actor when I was also in my 20s. [My father] was like, ‘What? Nononononono!’, because I got my degree in psychology.” He wanted Ricamora to get a PhD. 

“I had Margaret Cho to look up to”

In 2012, after completing acting training, he starred in the play Allegiance and spent time with George Takei, one of the only out gay Asian-American actors of the time. “I [also] had Margaret Cho to look up to,” he adds with a wry laugh, acknowledging the lack of a queer, Asian male muse. When Daniel Dae Kim joined Lost, it at least gave him a “sexy Asian man on TV” he could admire. 

The two facets of his identity didn’t always meld neatly. There were times growing up, he says, “where I felt tension between the two communities. Both Asian-Americans against LGBTQ populations, and especially gay men looking down on Asian men.” The fact that the acting career he longed for would eventually combine the two so beautifully feels kismet.

Beginning in 2014, How To Get Away With Murder was major, both for Ricamora’s career and for meaty, queer Asian representation. Oliver was considerate, occasionally conniving, a warm-hearted smartass, HIV-positive, sexually charged, hot. 

“I, number one, didn’t know that I would ever see a gay – well, multiple gay sex scenes throughout the seasons – on primetime network television. This was airing on ABC which is owned by Disney!” he scoffs. “So it did feel like a huge win for representation for LGBTQ people. And then as an Asian man? I cannot remember seeing an Asian man in a sex scene.” He takes a second to think. “I don’t even have a reference for it.”

“This was the first time that they saw an Asian man have a sex life”

The impact was felt worldwide. “Still to this day, I will have Asian-Americans and Asians in other parts of the world reaching out to me to say that this was the first time that they saw an Asian man have a sex life that was three-dimensional on TV, that wasn’t a caricature or a stereotype, and how much confidence that then gave them to live their full lives and to step into their own sexuality with confidence,” he says. “Because if you don’t see it, it’s hard to then be that.”

‘Coliver’ were cherished until the show came to an end in 2020 with a crushing finale (RIP, Bonnie). Ricamora lined up his next major project in the form of Joel Kim Booster’s 2022 queer Pride and Prejudice-inspired romcom Fire Island. It starred fellow gay Asian-Americans and Ricamora’s friends Bowen Yang and Booster, with Ricamora playing rich, judgy lawyer and Mr. Darcy character, Will. 

He was shocked the role existed, and even more shocked to bag it. “For a feature film to have a cast of so many Asian-Americans, I was like, ‘Oh, how is this getting greenlit?’ because there usually has to be one of us and then, like, a lot of others like white people around us,” he says. “I played the IT guy on How To Get Away With Murder for six years, so I didn’t think playing the heartthrob was in the cards for me.” Margaret Cho, his role model, also appeared, a “huge” full circle moment.

Now Ricamora is stepping into Cho’s shoes, ready to be that role model for the next generation of Asian talent, with $70K (and counting) to put where his mouth is. “It’s really tough in the US,” he says, quietly pointing to Trump’s targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. “To me the word diversity isn’t even real. It’s truly just representing the population that exists… we exist, we’re here.”

“Progress is so fragile”

The Maybe Happy Ending casting debacle brought these feelings, hot and frustrated and exhausted, screaming to the surface. “It just goes to show you that progress is so fragile, and we can so easily slip back into the old patterns.” Speaking out about those feelings was tough, still. “We’ve sat on them for so long. It’s especially hard to speak up when it’s with a show that’s currently running, that you hopefully might get cast in.”

Plus, there were social media detractors who questioned: which Asian-American performers are big enough to replace a ticket-selling titan like Darren Criss? “And my thing is like, if you don’t cast Asian-American men in lead roles, they won’t get well known and then they won’t be able to build a career,” he laments.

“If you keep cutting us off at the knees, then we never get to build any continuity.” As Ricamora knows, a little career continuity can bring revolutionary TV, Tonys, and the chance to pay it all forward.

RepresentAsian: An Evening of Asian Talent takes place at Lyric Theatre in London on 13 October. Tickets available now.

Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.