GREGINHOLLYWOOD - 20/Mar/2009

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Friday Morning Man: Luke Macfarlane!
By Greg Hernandez on Mar 20, 2009 12:00 am

He had them at mango salsa.

When Luke MacFarlane’s endearing character of Scotty sat down to dinner for the first time with the Walker clan on ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters two seasons ago, it was a big outdoor party scene where Sally Field’s Nora had just humiliated her late husband’s mistress Holly (Patricia Wettig). The tension was incredibly high until Scotty piped up and asked, “Is this salsa mango?”

Scotty Wandell and Kevin Walker (Matthew Rhys) had instant chemistry from the minute the financially struggling waiter-turned-chef walked into his law office on a legal matter. He cut through Kevin’s veneer with quirky humor and charm and you knew he had Kevin’s heart when he bit into a red velvet cupcake and smiled at the end of one of their early episodes..

“My whole experience on the show started off as just a few episodes and it’s just become more and more and more and I’m so grateful for that,” Luke told me when we spoke last year.

The current season is his first as a full-fledged regular. “It’s very, very nice. We all know in television it’s hard to get a gig that lasts for a long time so when the agent calls up and says, ‘You’re guaranteed these number of episodes you feel very, very lucky.”

Luke studied drama at Julliard and until last year, he had been intensely private about his personal life. Then he decided to share with a Canadian newspaper that not only is he playing a gay man on TV, but he is a gay man in life.

“It’s been relatively simple for me,” he told me shortly after that disclosure. “I’ll say that I decided to do that interview, I decided to answer those questions in an effort to make my life simpler and that’s going to contunue to be my motto. So, I’ll have to say, it hasn’t been that hot a light on me at all.”

Over three seasons, Kevin and Scotty have become the most high-profile on-screen couple on network television – a couple whose life together is treated similarly to the lives of the other Walker offspring and who actually kiss passionately!

Luke is moonlighting these days as F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Blank Theatre Company’s production of Allan Knee’s play “the Jazz Age” which runs through Sunday.