Wentworth Miller: "No, I'm not gay"

AUSTRALIA - When US television actor Wentworth Miller says he can't be your friend, he wants you to know he means it.
The star of Prison Break has had a hard time since shooting to international stardom on the back of the popular television thriller, which hit Australian screens in 2006.
But it's not personal, the 34-year-old insists - it's just that people requesting his friendship on the popular online networking site, myspace.com, are being duped.
"I have people calling my agent asking which myspace page is mine and there are about a dozen," Miller told AAP on a publicity trip to Australia in December.
"And the fact is I've never been on myspace. People posing as me is a little unsettling, a little frightening... it disturbs me on a profound level."
It's been a dizzying rise to the top for the young actor, who came into the series with just a few movie and television credits to his name.
Miller admits a small cameo role in two of Mariah Carey's music video clips "did more for my career than anything I'd done up until that point".
At that point, he had just completed the pilot for Prison Break, which was to catapult the star in the celebrity sphere - a place Miller is still coming to terms with.
"What happens to your identity, to the perception of who you are on this journey is a strange one," he said while on his first visit down under.
"There's this kind of star struck dynamic, I guess that's why they invented that word to describe that moment when a fan comes running up to you and they're so excited to see you.
"(But) inevitably there's this moment, where the shoe drops and they realise they have no idea who you are.
"I guess it's that strangeness, the identification with an actor, with a character, (and) the reality that you don't really know them at all which is kind of hard to wrap your head around."
And with the fan's adoration, so too comes the media speculation, particularly around Miller's sexuality, but the softly spoken actor was firm when setting the record straight.
"No, I'm not gay," he said.
"I know these rumours are out there ... I'm cool with the fact that they exist, I mean this is about fantasy.
"Certain people are going to have certain fantasies, if someone wants to imagine me with a woman, or a man or one of each that's cool with me as long as you keep watching the show."
That seems assured, with Australian audiences pining for the return of Prison Break, which ended season one with a dramatic cliffhanger on the Seven Network.
Foxtel is current playing series one over the summer.
Miller said there was still much to expect in season two, despite the inmates escaping and fulfilling the series' title.
"The prison was central to the show, perhaps the most important character and if we leave that behind ... the question is will (the fans) keep tuning in?" he said.
"But we also have storylines and relationship that I think people were willing to invest in, so people did care enough about us to follow us once we jumped over the wall."
Miller said he was fond of his character, who he described as existing in the shades of grey.
"My character is a good man on a hero's journey, but that requires him to get his hands dirty from time to time," he said.
"The question becomes how far can he go before you lose sympathy in his cause entirely."
But Miller doesn't see himself playing a convict on the run forever and has plans to produce and direct his own movie - a love story with a Hitchcock twist.
"I'm now at the stage of my career where it's not just about the parts that are out there, but it's about generating your own parts," he said.
"I want to write the words that come out of my mouth and I want to be in the editing room, and choosing how my story is going to get told."
Coming from a family of academics, Miller said a career in the arts was never on the cards despite his early passion for acting.
After high school, Miller studied at Princeton, where he continued acting, but only as a hobby.
"At Princeton you take it seriously but then it stops as soon as you graduate," he said.
"I graduated and abandoned any expectations I might have had about pursuing acting because it seemed scary and an unrealistic pipedream."
But still in love with the world of acting, he moved to Los Angeles where he settled for behind-the-scenes jobs, with desks and steady paycheques to the relief of his family.
"The world of acting was so foreign to them, all they knew was that I wasn't getting up at a respectable hour, I didn't have a job, I didn't have a steady source of income," he said.
"Their fears sometimes fuelled my fears ... but now that I'm enjoying some kind of success they're free to breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the ride along with me which is nice."
from The West