Luke Macfarlane is looking back at meeting Candace Cameron Bure when they costarred in a Hallmark Channel movie.
“I will admit that I was nervous to work with her,” Macfarlane, 43, said during a recent episode of the “Tosh Show” podcast. “But, she could not have been more lovely.”
After host Daniel Tosh quipped that Cameron Bure, 47, “probably” doesn’t approve of Macfarlane’s “lifestyle” as an openly gay man, Macfarlane noted that it did not come up in conversation.
“We never talked about it,” Macfarlane stressed of his 2018 A Shoe Addict’s Christmas costar. “She has a lot of gay friends.”
Cameron Bure was the reigning queen of Hallmark for many years until she left the network in 2022 for Great American Media. Speaking to WSJ. Magazine that November, the actress praised Great American Media for prioritizing “traditional marriage” in its romance movies. (Hallmark and Lifetime alike have since become more inclusive, adding several LGBTQ+ films to their yearly slates.)
Cameron Bure’s remarks quickly sparked backlash from the queer community and allies before she issued an apology.
“It absolutely breaks my heart that anyone would ever think I intentionally would want to offend and hurt anyone,” Cameron Bure wrote in a lengthy Instagram statement. “It saddens me that the media is often seeking to divide us, even around a subject as comforting and merry as Christmas movies. But, given the toxic climate in our culture right now, I shouldn’t be surprised. We need Christmas more than ever.”
Macfarlane previously defended Hallmark’s decision to feature more LGBTQ+ couples on screen. (The actor, who publicly came out as gay in 2008, played a queer man in 2023’s Notes of Autumn.)
“It’s that whole thing that was, why does me having visibility make yourself any less different? I think that we all deserve a place in the media, in the film world,” Macfarlane told The Hollywood Reporter in a July interview.
During his December appearance on the “Tosh Show,” Macfarlane further elaborated on representation in the casting process.
“I don’t know if I was ever limited [and] I don’t know if [roles] were ever held for me, but you know, network testing for a TV show is a big deal. You got all these people there they’re curious [and] they’re afraid their thing that they’re spending all this money on is not going to make money,” Macfarlane added. “There’s like famous stories of things that tested really badly and did really well, you know, Bros tested really, really well.”
Macfarlane starred opposite Billy Eichner in 2022’s Bros, one of the first studio rom-coms starring a same-sex couple, which disappointed at the box office.
“Billy is a really big fan of the movies from the ’90s [like] You’ve Got Mail and Notting Hill and I think his sensibility is much more of the sort of like big openhearted rom-com,” Macfarlane pointed out. “And Judd [Apatow] and Nick [Stoller] are like, ‘Jokes are really important.’ I thought it was a really successful hybrid of those two things.”
