Drew Tarver Talks Playing the Villain on 'The Other Two' (And Showing his Hairy Nipple)

Is there a show more in the Zeitgeist than "The Other Two?" From parodying Billy Porter's runway looks and Disney's lame attempts at integrating queer characters in their movies to gay Instagram influencers (called "Instagays"), the series hits targets in contemporary society unlike any other on the air. The show even had a cameo from trending queer actor Lukas Gage, who recently made headlines after his marriage to celebrity hair stylist Chris Appleton.

The show centers on the relationship between siblings Cary (Drew Tarver) and Brooke (Heléne Yorke), their superstar brother, Justin Bieber-esque Chase Dubek (Case Walker), as well as their mother, Pat Dubek (Molly Shannon), who becomes a major talk show host. Though both in their early 30s, neither Cary, an actor, and Brooke, a media consultant, have much professional success, though both continue to try – Brooke by working for Chase's manager, Shuli Kucerac (Wanda Sykes), and Cary with his floundering acting career, most recently as "an anthropomorphic mucus" called Globby, who will have the studio's first-ever explicitly gay scene.

But in the show's third season, Cary's career is taking off despite a change in the character's story arc. "The more he engages with fame, the more he loses sight, I think, of why he wanted to do this," Tarver tells Vanity Fair.

Nor is his personal life working out, despite having a sexy boyfriend in the person of Lucas (Fin Argus), a young Method actor whose commitment to his roles excludes him having sex with Cary. "I don't think he's managing them well," said Tarver of Cary's personal and professional lives. "I think he does want love, and he also really wants to be successful. And he's like, Wait, are those mutually exclusive? Am I combining them? He's combining them in a way that I don't think is serving him well."

But one change in Season Three is how Brooke and Cary are seen as self-sabotaging villains, Brooke with her failed attempts at "doing good" in attempts to compete with her himbo boyfriend, Lance (Josh Segarra), who became a nurse during the Pandemic. With Cary, it is his competition with his best friend, Curtis (Brandon Scott Jones), with whom he had a friendship breakup scene in the last episode. "This season is more surreal, and the swings are bigger. Going full villain in the third season has been a very fun thing to play, and try to pull it off and be like, Can I bring an audience along with this character, this far into Walter White-esque [territory]?"

He laughed, then added. "Cary will start making meth in his RV soon, and you'll probably be like, That's actually the best thing Cary's done. That's actually not villainous at all, compared to the other stuff."

As for Globby, he discussed the genesis of the idea. "Globby was originally a fish or something," Tarver says. "When I was doing ADR, they had redesigned Globby. Globby ended up looking more like one of those fish that gets puffy, with the spikes on them, with the weird little mouth, and it was killing me. The Globby redesign looked so much more dumb than the original Globby, and it was perfect. I could not look at Globby without laughing."

He also mentioned how, during the pandemic, he hit the gym. "I'm glad that during the pandemic I did more pushups," quipped Tarver. "In previous seasons, he's been a little in his head about love. I enjoy that he's a little bit more in his body sexually, and that means me showing a little more thigh or a little more shoulder. If that means I got to show a hairy nipple, I got to show it."