2022 Rewind: 'Heroes' Actor Thomas Dekker Says Outing Opened Doors for Him

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Variety reports that in 2017 Bryan Fuller, the co-executive producer and writer of the NBC series "Heroes," gave a speech at L.A.'s LGBTQ film festival Outfest where he talked about a gay actor on the show whose character was also gay until the actor's team insisted he be straight.

Fuller didn't mention the actor by name, but it didn't take long for people to figure out it was Thomas Dekker, who played the recurring character of Zach on the show for twelve episodes.

Dekker responded with a tweet in which he acknowledged he is gay.

Now five years later the actor tells Variety he has no hard feelings towards Fuller.

"Everyone has their journey and I hated that mine was taken away from me in a way," Dekker, who is now married to actor Jesse Haddock, said. "But it was also this kind of a weird fucked up blessing because it opened the door for me to just be fully who I am."

One door it opened is Dekker playing his first gay role since coming out on Roku's new series "Swimming With Sharks. On the show he plays Travis, an out studio assistant. The series is inspired by the 1994 comedy of the same name about the Hollywood studio system, starring Kevin Spacey as an abusive movie mogul and Frank Whaley as his beleaguered assistant. For the show, the sexes of the two leads are reversed with Diane Kruger playing the exec and Kiernan Shipka (of "Mad Men") playing her assistant. Dekker plays another of Kruger's assistants in this behind-the-scenes look of the cutthroat world of film production.

Dekker acknowledged playing gay and bi characters before, but this time it felt different. "I think, first of all, just by virtue of being out, I am healthier and able to do what I do the way I do it in a more effective, consistent way. I was in a weird era where it was a career-killer to be gay, but it was a career asset to play gay. So here I was 22 at Cannes in 2010 promoting my Gregg Araki sex movie, "Kaboom," but God forbid anybody knew I liked men. Fortunately, the world has changed so much in the last 10 years in the industry as far as acceptance and inclusion."

He also acknowledged how his being gay was often the subtext to conversations when discussing roles with industry execs. "I remember being on a certain TV show for a network and I was called into a board meeting with the heads of the network to basically very gently say to me, "We don't want you to confuse the audience. We want to make sure that you don't get in the way of this role." It was a very veiled way of saying, "Stay in the closet." Today feels like a whole new world to be out. I feel free."

He is also drug and alcohol free, a decision he made after being charged with a DUI in 2009. "I started in Alcoholics Anonymous. I'd been in those rooms with friends of mine for their sobriety. This was in early 20s. So I had knowledge of it and that was good because it made it way less intimidating. When the day came, it was like I know what this is, but I also had numerous friends of mine and people I'd worked with and my own spouse who had come to me and said, "This is a problem."

Dekker also said for his next role he would like to push the LGBTQ film envelope which he describes as "an unapologetically gay genre mind-bender that "hasn't been done before."

I'm writing it and I'll direct. We're in the process of getting that off the ground right now. And I'll tell you, every time I have a meeting about this film, the verbiage is always, "It's just really hard to get a film of this size made." It's a relatively small film, but they always say that a film of this size that is a genre film, a film with a fully gay character lead is impossible to get made. And my response every time is, "Okay, then we'll be the first." I'm not going to be deterred because it hasn't been done before."