Jack Dylan Grazer, the 17-year-old actor who voiced Alberto in Disney’s quasi-gay animated feature Luca, has come out as bisexual.
Grazer came out in an Instagram Live video last Thursday. In it, he read a fan’s question which asked, “Are you gay?” After a brief pause, Grazer said, “I’m bi.” He then stated, “Silenzio, Bruno!” a line from Luca that his character says to quiet the discouraging voice inside his head.
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Shortly thereafter, Grazer updated the pronouns on his Instagram bio to read he/they.
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jack dylan grazer coming out as bi and then immediately shouting SILENZIO BRUNO good for them good for them!! pic.twitter.com/IBKDox5a2G
— alyssa (@alyssakayden) July 1, 2021
While fans on Twitter praised Grazer’s coming out, a closer look at his previous roles shows his steady streak of playing queer and queer-encoded characters.
In 2017 and 2019, he played Eddie Kaspbrak, a queer-coded, uptight hypochondriac kid in It and It: Chapter Two, two films based on Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It. While King’s novel only hinted at Kaspbrak’s queerness, the recent film suggested his character’s romantic connection to a male adult friend even more.
In 2020, Grazer played Frazer Wilson, a pansexual teenager in the 2020 HBO-Sky Atlantic coming-of-age drama TV series We Are Who We Are, directed by out gay director Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino also directed the explicitly gay 2017 coming-of-age film Call Me By Your Name.
In We Are Who We Are, Wilson is a young, moody high schooler from New York who comes to a military base in Veneto, Italy with his lesbian mothers. Wilson develops an attraction to Jonathan Kritchevsky, his mother’s assistant. He ogles Kritchevsky as he undresses, jealously regards Kritchevsky’s girlfriend and copiously drinks himself into an upset stupor after he sidesteps the possibility of having a threesome with the couple.
“Fraser is not gay,” Grazer said during an interview about the role. “Fraser is not straight. He’s not bisexual. He is truly attracted to what he’s attracted to, as most humans are.”
Then, in 2021, Grazer voiced Alberto in Disney’s Luca. While Grazer has said that Alberto’s relationship with the film’s titular male character is just a friendship, many have read the film as an encoded queer romance. Both boys help protect the other from being outed as sea monsters while they masquerade as completely human in a seaside Italian town full of monster-phobic fishermen. The New York Times jokingly titled their review of the film, “Calamari By Your Name.”
Despite Grazer’s take on the film’s platonic relationship, he has also said that he could see the two boys falling in love in a sequel.
