Ryan Phillippe sat down with Barstool Sports’ KFC Radio podcast this week and revealed some details about his earlier roles. Phillippe said his religious parents shunned him for playing a gay teen on One Life To Live.
Said Phillippe: “I thought my parents were going to disown me [for deciding to do Cruel Intentions]. I had grown up going to, like, Baptist school and Christian school. My first role ever coming out of the Christian school when I was a senior in high school, I played the first gay character on a soap opera — first gay teenager ever — and so I was shunned at that point. So they were already out of the picture. I mean this was 1992, and I was playing a gay teenager and I was in a Christian school. They weren’t happy about it.”
Phillippe also reflected on his Cruel Intentions role as Sebastian Valmont: “When I was doing the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer the same producer had the script for Cruel Intentions and I read the script in my trailer. … I remember walking out the trailer and finding him. I’m like, ‘Are you guys really going to make this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And I was you know — I’ve still never played a character like that since. I’m dabbling in comedies here and there … I want to get back to playing a character like Sebastian in Cruel Intentions. It was just so fun to be so flippant and sort of like, you know, the emotions are theatrical.”
