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Based on a real-life incident in the gay author and accomplished painter’s life, the Victorian novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, set in 19th Century London, explores the psychic crisis of an extremely handsome, young man--an ideal of youthful, unccorupted purity--whose ego is swelled once he views a full-length portrait that his older friend Basil Hallward paints of him.

Influenced by the vile tempter Lord Henry Wotton, who meets the subject and poisons him with his focus on youthful vanity, Gray pays too much attention to his good looks and laments that the picture would merely serve as a reminder of what he has lost as he ages.

"I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything...Youth is the only thing worth having," Gray cries out in the novel.

Wishing that the picture should grow old while he remains forever young: "I would give everything. I would give my soul for that!" Gray takes the painting home that very evening and becomes fast friends with Wotton, who leads him on a downward path, evident in his deteriorated portrait, which grows more and more aged and disfigured, while Gray’s own face remains untarnished–-that is, until his crimes catch up with him.

Gray’s willingness to sell his soul to the Devil for worldly vanity takes on special meaning in our youth-obsessed culture where a gym membership, plastic surgery and dressing like a teenager in order to look like a teenager is preeminent.

One would imagine that Roy, who recently turned 40, would by now have learned from Gray’s fatal flaw. Not so, according to the rest of his Page Six interview, where he slams Ryan Phillippe, who earlier this year stopped production of a competing adaptation which the angelic actor planned to produce, direct and play the lead in.

"Who was going to believe that he's 18 years old?" says Roy of Phillippe.

Not only is the answer to this question debatable, it overlooks how convincingly Phillippe has played same-sex friendly roles from gay high school student Billy Douglas on daytime soap One Life To Live from 1992-1993 to the part of Harry Denton, the bisexual up-and-coming actor willing to sleep his way to the top in Robert Altman’s 2001 film Gosford Park.

So Gallagher is and looks 18. But can he pull off the part?

His gay fans can’t wait to find out.

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