Marcus Rosner Talks My Fake Boyfriend, Pushing Himself as a Storyteller, and More

Marcus Rosner has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men. He’s known for his swoon-worthy performances in projects including Once Upon a Time, UnREAL, Arrow, and The Wedding Planners.

This summer, he shows off his versatility portraying a character unlike any he’s played before in My Fake Boyfriend. In the laugh-out-loud comedy, a young man in a tricky situation (Keiynan Lonsdale) follows the advice of his unconventional best friend (Dylan Sprouse) and uses social media to create a fake boyfriend to keep his awful ex-lover (Marcus Rosner) out of his life. But everything backfires when he meets the real love of his life, and breaking up with his fake boyfriend proves hard to do.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to catch up with Marcus to chat about My Fake Boyfriend, the incredible work he’s done in front of and behind the camera, and more.

PC: You’ve had so much success throughout your career. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out to you?
Marcus: I’m always biased based on recency. It always feels like the latest thing that I’ve made is where I’m like, “Now I’ve made it.” This latest project, My Fake Boyfriend, feels like a step up for me in my acting career. I’m riding this wave, and it feels like a major highlight.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Marcus: That’s a great question. The reason that I started acting, as silly as it sounds, was because of Tom Cruise’s performance in Jerry Maguire. It was a performance that I looked up to a lot as a kid.

Then since I actually began my career, it’s been all these people that I’ve run into along the way and have gotten to see act firsthand and see how they hold themselves professionally. You take little things from each of them and you apply them in a way that suits your values and represents the person that you want to be and the actor that you want to be.

PC: In addition to being an actor, you’re also a producer. How have your experiences behind the scenes impacted the way that you approach characters on screen and vice versa?
Marcus: Massively. A bit in terms of performance and acting technique but a lot in terms of the way that I approach professionalism and the importance of being flexible and understanding how schedules can change. Sometimes, you can get frustrated by it, but you don’t realize the thousand moving mechanisms behind a decision and how you’re one small cog in this giant machine. Any actor that gets a chance to step behind the camera and either direct or produce will have that illuminated for them very quickly. Then your level of understanding going forward is much greater.

But also in terms of acting technique, when you get to be a part of an editing process, you see the little things that work. You get to see how little you have to push your performance at times and how much you have to push your performance at other times. Watching your films is like an athletic endeavor. It’s always good to put your ego aside and watch your tape and assess yourself.

PC: You’ve said one of the reasons why you got into producing was to bring film and television back to your hometown where you didn’t think a career in this industry was possible. Have you had time to reflect on the impact that you’re making, knowing that this won’t be the case for future generations?
Marcus: I really, really hope that it’s not the case for future generations, but we have a long way to go for that. It’s certainly not time to take any credit for or celebrate that yet. It feels very much like we’re still in the early days of that mission, but there are always these little moments. Every week as we’re putting together a movie here, that reminds me how far we’ve come and how this wasn’t possible to see when I was growing up here. That can be as simple as seeing my mom on set doing a job for us or seeing one of the kids from my old high school acting in a scene or seeing my family and friends as background extras. It’s a weird marriage between my long-standing professional life and my long-standing personal life. It warms my heart to see that community come together.

PC: Tell us about My Fake Boyfriend, your character in the film, and what drew you to this project.
Marcus: The things that I love about the project are that it’s so vastly different from things I’ve gotten to work on in the past. It tackles elements of society that are very close to my heart in ways that I haven’t gotten to be a part of on-camera in projects before. It’s a comedy, which I haven’t gotten a lot of opportunities to do and which is something that I feel I’m good at. I want to do more of it. There were so many things about this project. The LGBTQIA+ community has been so inviting and open and excited by my performance in it. That warms my heart because I was scared as I was delivering this performance because it was a reach for me. It felt like a risk. To see how it’s been received has been nothing short of absolutely heartwarming.

PC: Speaking of scary things, you actually did the table read before you signed onto the project. How nervewracking was that experience?
Marcus: [laughs] That was so abnormal and frightening. My wife and I were in Guatemala last year scouting for our upcoming wedding. It came into my inbox and I threw it on tape in our hotel room as we were heading out the door. Cut to two weeks later, I got this call from my agent. She says, “They’re about to do this table read. They want to offer you this part, but we don’t have a deal in place yet. They want you to jump on the table read,” which from an actor’s perspective is a quick way to lose a job, especially when you don’t have any prior knowledge of the movie.

I didn’t even know if it was a comedy or drama. I didn’t know anything about the premise. I went back and watched the audition tape that I had made for the character to remind myself who this person was because I had done it so quickly. I had to weigh the pros and cons of doing this table read because I thought I could blow this because I was going in completely unprepared. I knew I could blow this and they could pull the deal. But I also knew they could be thinking, “Well, this guy isn’t a team player. Now we don’t want to work with him.” I took the plunge and did the table read. Luckily, it all turned out well.

PC: Like you were saying earlier, this role is such a departure from what fans have come to expect from you. What challenges did that bring you during the creative process? How did that change your preparation?
Marcus: It changed my preparation greatly. I really dove in. The types of movies that I’ve been doing for a long time now are these TV movies. They’re romantic comedies. I feel like I’ve sort of established who that character is, and he’s very close to who I am as a person. It’s always a lot of fun to work on those projects, but it’s become second nature at this point. This character was so different from who I am in the most exciting and thrilling ways, but I was always afraid of overdoing it or offending someone. That was a terrifying but also very fulfilling process.

PC: When you’re playing a character who is so over-the-top and narcissistic, how do you keep him grounded?
Marcus: That’s such a great question and one that I grappled with. On the page, Nico has every opportunity to be one of the highlights of the film because he’s doing the craziest stuff in every scene that he’s in, but I was so afraid of making it too lampoony or making him so despicable because the things that he’s doing are so despicable. At the end of the day, what I decided was that if I was having fun doing all those things then that would come through in the character. That’s a lot of the feedback that I’ve been getting is you can see how much fun Nico is having being Nico, even when he’s being evil. It’s fun for the audience to absorb that.

PC: The film’s been incredibly well received. What do you think is resonating most with audiences and what do you hope they take away?
Marcus: Speaking to my friends who are in the LGBTQIA+ community over years, I know that there are many films that dive into this subject matter and that are about trials and tribulations. I know that I personally and a lot of my friends in this community whom I have spoken with just want to have it be normalized and treated as matter of fact and less about how difficult the experience can be. We all have horrible dating experiences that are crazy, zany, and fun. This is a fun film that’s showing one gay man’s experience living in New York.

PC: What’s next for you?
Marcus: We’re jumping into two TV movie rom-coms that I’ll be producing. I’ll be starring in them as well. We’ll be shooting those in July and August, and then I have a Christmas movie coming out.

PC: You’ve done it all in your career. What’s left on that bucket list?
Marcus: I’ve often been told I look like Christopher Reeve, and I’ve often wondered if there’s a really interesting biopic to be done there because he had such a fascinating life. I haven’t even begun to explore the avenues that would take me there. But I don’t know, that’s just one that jumps to mind.

To keep up with Marcus, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Watch My Fake Boyfriend on Prime Video today.

Photo Credit: Lane Dorsey