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Though he may have anticipated the challenge of playing gay, Maguire admits that playing American can be intimidating. “Doing both [playing a gay and American character] in a weird way helps to sort of sidestep away from myself, though on certain days I don't know whether I'm doing too much or to little,” he says. “It means a lot to me, since I have a lot of a gay friends, and I'll really hear it from them if I don't get it right.”

Playing someone who is so different from his normal self requires a significant change in his demeanor, Maguire says. “I'm trying to build a real character here — the accent and the mannerisms and whatever. And I'm being true to what I'm trying to create. It's a bit scary, but that's the fun of having a challenge, I suppose.”

No stranger to acting with his regular accent, Maguire is The Class' cast member with the most experience in front of a camera. After acting alongside Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1982 TV film A Voyage Round My Father, Maguire starred in the popular British children's show Grange Hill. He followed this with a stint on the soap opera EastEnders and has even had a recording career, with three pop albums to his name. “I had a lot of fun getting drunk at the record company's expense,” Maguire says of his days as a singer.

After relocating to the United States, Maguire starred in the short-lived WB series Off Centre before moving on to Eve. During Eve's third season, Maguire auditioned for his role on The Class, though he didn't expect to land the role. “We didn't know if the show looked like it was coming back,” he says of Eve, “but I wanted to meet David and Jeffrey. I was a huge fan of Friends and Mad About You. But because I didn't know if I could be on this new show, I think I went in with the attitude that I probably can't get it. I walked in quite relaxed, I think.”

Whatever the reason, Maguire landed the role, which he now realizes is one that may grant him increased visibility to gay TV viewers, especially in comparison to other shows this season. “It was mentioned to me that there were only like four or so gay characters on new shows,” he says. “I didn't initially give it much thought because I knew I'd be playing the character to the best of my ability. So in that way, I don't think it makes as much of a difference to me.”

Maguire says he was pleased to find that Kyle was such a well-written character, given the more one-dimensional, supporting roles that gay characters are often relegated to. “The character is really well-written, as you'd expect from David and Jeffrey,” Maguire says. “Often times on TV you have gay characters who are stereotypes. But with this character, it's not that way. They have a nice, healthy, stable relationship, and they just happen to be gay.”

Cristián de la Fuente, the Chilean actor playing Kyle's lover, Aaron, is not a series regular, but appears in several of the episodes that have been filmed so far. “We have a great working relationship,” Maguire says. “He's very cool — a great guy to hang out with. … He's not a regular yet, but as sitcoms go, people write according to what they like, so maybe we will get to see more of him.”

Sam Harris, on the other hand, approaches his role from a perspective almost opposite that of Maguire. “It's an interesting twist, really,” he says of playing the sexually ambiguous Perry. “A lot of the time, it's an actor playing a gay role, and he won't say whether he's gay or not. But in my case now, I'm a gay actor and I'm not going to say whether my character's gay or not.”

In truth, Harris doesn't know what Perry's sexuality might be, a fact that has given the actor a certain freedom in how he plays him. “Perry loves his wife,” Harris explains, “and he loves his kid. But he's also this wonderful free spirit that has no idea that anybody might have questions about him. He's not lascivious or stashing porn magazines under his mattress or anything like that. He just has this sensibility about him that we would all perceive as stereotypically gay.”

In the show's pilot, Perry's mannerisms are not played for laughs. Rather, the comedy is derived from the awkward fact that a seemingly incompatible couple apparently works. Harris thinks that this is more of a comment on the sensibilities of the viewing audience than on gay people themselves. He offers: “People might look at somebody and say, ‘Oh, he's in Prada shoes. He's into design. He must be gay.' But they might be pigeonholing them, because they really don't know what the hell someone else's sexuality is.”

Harris believes that the character of Perry is especially enjoyable in comparison to Maguire's character, who represents more of a regular-Joe type of guy than a stereotype. “We have Sean playing the gay guy, and he's in a healthy relationship,” Harris explains. “It's kind of fun in that we created this thing where the presumably straight character is silly and girly and all that, and then the guy we know is gay isn't a cartoon.”

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