Interview with "Will & Grace"’s Max Mutchnick

AE: So do you think you were exercising some self-imposed restraint by not initially pitching a Will & Grace?
MM: No. That wasn’t the case at that time. I think the only time I started to exercise restraint was in the body of the show. The things that got us to create Will & Grace were beautiful fortuitous moments in a development process, which certainly didn’t start from any sort of reluctance. That said: My writing partner David Kohan, the straight half of the team, deserves all the credit for making sure that we told a gay love story.

AE: So he really pushed it?
MM: Yeah. He for sure is the singular reason that [Will & Grace] is here today.

AE: Now how do you explain that?
MM: Because he was the one that said, “That would be the most interesting relationship to write, you and Janet [Mutchnick’s best friend and the basis for the character of Grace Adler].” I was not interested in that at all, for the reason that I didn’t think that anybody else would be interested.

David Kohan, Debra Messing & Max Mutchnick

AE: But you opened this interview with your own internalized oppression.
MM: I just said I exercised that throughout the 197 episodes.

AE: You think that you did?
MM: Yes, I do. I think that I was very acutely aware that the larger part of the audience of Will & Grace was straight. And I always was very clear that I was writing that show for my parents. My proverbial parents. …

I don’t know if I’ve ever told anyone this story. The pilot had been picked up for Will & Grace, and now it was all about casting. And I was sitting in the Bel Air home of a very, famous gay director. And when I told him about the script he said: “Just make sure you don’t make it too butt-f***y.” And I said: “What does that mean?” And he said, “You never want the American public to have to think about butt-f***ing.” And it could not have been better advice. Because it made us understand what our job was. And our job was to get as many people as possible to be entertained and to watch the show every week.

I could have gone full-tilt in the first 13 episodes. But I chose to not do explicit stuff, and edgy, edgy gay stuff. Because I wanted people to stay with it, get comfortable with it. David and I said to each other, we’ll have won if by the time this show is over the audience wants Will to be in love, wants him to be in a relationship.

AE: So your idea was to be a bridge to a place on the air…
Mm: None of it dawned on me until the show happened. This literally unfolded as I was doing it. It’s a metaphor for the coming-out process that a young man has within their family. And that is exactly the way the show was written. It was: We told you we were gay in the first minutes. And then we slowly allowed you to absorb it and figure it out and get comfortable with it. And realize that we’re the same as everybody else in the room.

AE: Do you think that internalized oppression you spoke of affected you before Will & Grace? In what you thought executives or audiences would accept?
MM: I think that it did when I was in the closet. And then the minute that I came out of the closet, I was on a mission to be equal to or greater than anyone I was with.

AE: I guess I mean in your writing.
MM: There was not even a whisper of gay anything, in anything we had done before Will & Grace.

AE: And what do you think the reason was for that?
MM: It didn’t even dawn on me to write it. … I just didn’t see it as a subject matter. I didn’t find myself to be that interesting or that funny. And it was my straight writing partner who said that whole language and the colloquialisms used in the gay world – he just found them to be so humorous and funny.

AE: I think that’s kind of striking that you didn’t see it as a possibility, that it took the straight guy. Do you think that you didn’t think of it as a subject because it was sort of off limits? Because somewhere you just felt like there’s no way the suits are going to accept it, there’s no way the audience is going to accept it?
MM: I don’t remember now because I’ve been out so long. I do feel like, I mean – if I’m being very honest – I have a healthy amount of insecurity and at times gay shame, and all that kind of stuff existed for me before I really came out. And yeah, I’m sure that affected everything that I did.

AE: With Will & Grace it was pretty groundbreaking for America to embrace a fully developed gay character in this way, and you were in many ways the guy behind it. I’m wondering if going through this and having Will get all this positive feedback affected your own self-acceptance as a gay man.
MM: It’s very simple. I was the gay guy who created Will & Grace. Yes. It helped my self-esteem quite a lot. … I mean how much more accepted can you feel then making a show that’s telling a story that is very close to the one you are living as your life – and all these people are watching it every week. What else is that telling you as the guy who’s writing it - that you’re ok.