Jeremy Sisto and Rex Lee Make “Suburgatory” A Little More Bearable

Rex Lee is having hair problems.

“All my friends asked me, ‘why did they put you in such a bad wig?’” said the actor, recounting the time he and his pals settled in to watch the pilot of his new ABC comedy series Suburgatory. “And that was my real hair. For whatever reason, my hair person and I decided that I was gonna have what at the time you would’ve called ‘Justin Bieber hair’. But apparently on camera it looks like I’m wearing a bad wig. So I bring shame to gays everywhere, apparently.”

Rex Lee (center) as Suburgatory's Mr. Wolf

Which, of course, isn’t true. Starring as Lloyd, the long-suffering assistant of Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) on the hit HBO series Entourage for seven seasons, Lee became a welcome anomaly in the TV landscape –a gay Asian-American actor, playing a gay Asian-American character in a major role. For Lee, the show broke ground personally as well.

“Entourage was a life-changing experience,” he said. “In Hollywood vernacular I was what they call a ‘nobody’, and all of a sudden I was somebody that people knew. …One day nobody knew who I was, and the next day I was at Outfest… and all of a sudden I heard people talking behind me like, ‘that’s the guy from Entourage, I just saw him on TV the other day!’ And as quickly as that, my life was completely different.”

As Lee as Lloyd on Entoruage

On Suburgatory Lee stars as Mr. Wolf, a well-meaning guidance counselor at a suburban high school who befriends new student Tessa Altman (the Ellen Page-esque Jane Levy). Tessa has just moved to the sleepy community from New York City with her father George (Jeremy Sisto), who decided to relocate after finding a box of condoms in Tessa’s room.

Jeremy Sisto as George on Suburgatory

“He thinks she’s a slut,” said Lee. “So he packs up and moves them to the suburbs, convinced that people in the suburbs are ‘normal’, and pure, and have morals, whatever that means. Only to find out there is no such thing as ‘normal’. People are freaky everywhere.”

Feeling neglected by the other students, who want nothing to do with him despite his best attempts at reaching out, Mr. Wolf finds purpose when he bonds with Tessa, who similarly feels like a pariah in her new community.

Given Lee’s involvement, of course, we couldn’t help but ask: is Mr. Wolf gay?

“At this point I don’t know,” said Lee. “And I don’t have a problem with this right now because of the context of who he is as the guidance counselor at the high school and not really showing his personal life. I have no idea. …I mean, as an actor I would never make him asexual unless they asked me to. So I’m creating a rich sort of like personal life for him. But that’s all very private. [Laughs]”

Later on we stopped to chat with the handsome and very approachable Sisto, perhaps best known to AE readers as the bipolar Billy Chenowith on Six Feet Under, a recurring role he played for several seasons. In Suburgatory, Sisto’s single dad character becomes quite popular among the “desperate housewives” contingent in his new neighborhood, drawing particular interest from the materialistic Dallas Royce (Cheryl Hines). Despite this, George is far more fixated on keeping Tessa out of trouble.

Sisto in a scene with Cheryl Hines

“I don’t think he’s that focused on that part of it,” said Sisto, referring to George’s newfound status as a suburban studmuffin. “At this point I think he’s kind of like trying to block a lot of that out to convince himself that he made the right move to raise his daughter in this place. …Mainly it’s [focused on] the father/daughter relationship. They’re trying to kind of take this idea of the suburbs, all the good and the bad parts of it, and make it a positive thing.”

As George will soon find out, of course, living in the suburbs presents its own set of problems. For one thing, he discovers it’s much harder to be an individual in a setting that tends to breed conformity.

“The individuality that you might develop from a city, [and] how that fits in to a suburban world where everyone is expected to be kind of similar…[we’re doing] kind of the comedic take on that dichotomy,” said Sisto, a native of Chicago who admitted that he himself isn’t the biggest fan of suburban life.

“I grew up in the city…and arbitrarily we didn’t like suburbanites when I was growing up,” he said. “I think I was probably threatened by them, because like I said it seemed to be a place where they didn’t accept individuality too much. I was probably threatened because of that. So in general I’ve had a tendency toward really not liking the suburbs.”

Speaking of diversity, I had to ask him whether the show would be focusing on any gay characters in the near future.

“I hope so,” he said. “That seems like a good storyline. I don’t know what the perspective on a storyline like that would be, but there’s definitely room for it.”

Perhaps they can add in a comedically tortured suburban gay character, a la Chris Cooper’s closeted military dad in American Beauty?

“Yeah, yeah, exactly!” Sisto responded. “There’s definitely…I mean, the whole suburban kind of stamping-down of who you are, it’s ripe for that. It’s just about whether or not it can be done in a funny way.”

In other words, don’t expect any “crying in the shower” scenes on the show. Of course, if the scene in question happened to involve Sisto crying in the shower, I’d be more than willing to overlook the tonal inconsistency.

Suburgatory premieres Wednesday, September 28^th at 8:30 PM