Pete Davidson Playing Gay Doesn’t Ruin ‘Set It Up,’ But He Comes Close

There’s a lot to like about Set It Up, the new romantic comedy from Netflix. It’s cute and funny. Stars Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell are thoroughly charming. There’s a great scene that prominently involves pizza. It’s part of a wave of Netflix movies that is giving us hope for the future of rom-coms. The one recurring drawback, one that threatens to be an anchor on the whole film, is that some genius decided it would be funny to cast Pete Davidson as Powell’s gay roommate.

You know Pete Davidson from Saturday Night Live, where he’s spent the past four years doing truncated stand-up routines at the “Weekend Update” desk and steadfastly declining to participate beyond the bare minimum in sketches. He’s kind of the perfect emblem of this current era of SNL, which has seen cast members take a back seat to guest-star political impressions and where “Weekend Update” is pretty much unwatchable. So how, then? How did Pete Davidson go from the guy who nearly ruined the otherwise perfecto Les Miserables lobster sketch to the guy who nearly ruined half of Glen Powell’s otherwise perfecto scenes in Set It Up? Great question!

Pete Davidson is not gay. I know this because he keeps saying so every time he shows up on “Update” to deliver a monologue about all the things he’d do if he were gay. The joke of all these bits seem to be that it would be really funny if someone like Pete Davidson were gay. Because he really seems to not be gay. That is the joke!

That also seems to be the joke in Set It Up. In the film, Davidson plays Duncan, roommate and best friend to Charlie (Powell), who apparently enjoys an active sex life, bringing a litany of men back to the apartment to bang to the fierce rhythms of Third Eye Blind on the soundtrack. We know all this because the movie has the characters say so. Because truly otherwise we would not know. This is because Davidson doesn’t put in the effort to act in his scenes. Not even a very little bit. It’s not that he’s bad at acting gay (though he is! quite bad!), it’s that he’s bad at acting. Full stop. He’s a heavy anchor on every scene he’s in, and I yelled out “NOOO!” like a movie character seconds before a car bomb goes off when I realized the film was going to have him befriend Deutch’s character, thus integrating him even further into the story.

Zoey Deutch is giving such a zippy, funny, relatable performance in this movie; it seems like a slap in the face to loan out such a crappy gay best friend to her. Not to mention the fact that a GBF to a straight character like Charlie would also be a decently fun dynamic. Again, if the actor playing said GBF were actually acting. Look, there is a long history of gay best friends in movies. It goes back decades. It’s something we gay folk have had complicated feelings about for a long time, because gay best friends were usually a backhanded reminder that gay characters never got to be the leads. However, in a representational desert, these characters were at least something, and we accepted them to varying degrees, flaws and all. Adam Scott in Monster-in-Law doesn’t deserve his legacy to be spit on this way. Steve Zahn in Reality Bites doesn’t deserve this. Damian from Mean Girls doesn’t deserve this. Zak Orth in Prime doesn’t deserve this. Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding certainly doesn’t deserve this.

There’s a lot of consternation these days about straight actors playing gay characters; everyone from Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name to Andrew Garfield in Angels in America on Broadway. Should straight actors be playing “our” parts? Can they possibly bring enough lived experience to those roles? Personally, though not universally, I tend to believe that acting is acting, and I’m as willing to to see a straight actor dive into a good role as I am with a gay actor. There are exceptions and caveats to this, but generally: it’s called acting for a reason. Performers step into lives that aren’t their own and inhabit them. That’s part of the magic.

That being said: Pete Davidson playing the gay best friend in Set It Up is an affront to decency and should be prosecutable by a just and aggressive legal system. Prosecutable for pushing the “the joke is how not gay this gay guy is” joke. Which is just as lazy as “the joke is how gay this guy is.” You can’t just make it the opposite! That’s not how effort works. Prosecutable for characterizing this Duncan as an inveterate ho and then having him cop out to this sad cheek kiss. Prosecutable for being utterly superfluous to the story on every single level (as GBFs often are) while at the same time failing to offer any colorful flourishes or allowing gay viewers to read any kind of interesting inner life into the character (which is the silver lining of any good GBF).  And most importantly, prosecutable for casting a low-effort actor whose only claim to fame is doing shitty gay-themed stand-up on a TV show with no gay men in its cast.

There were good actors in this! The phenomenally funny out gay actor Jeff Hiller gets two scenes as an annoyed waiter (classic gay role). He would have been perfect playing Duncan. Or if the filmmakers somehow desperately needed to cast an SNL straight man, they already had Jon Rudnitsky (who was so effective playing one of the trio of very good boys opposite Reese Witherspoon in Home Again) playing another role. There were alternatives to this path! This did not have to happen!

Now somebody fix me up with Taye Diggs so I can stop being angry about this.

Stream Set It Up on Netflix