“I felt like I was almost there and then I regressed,” he said. It finally came out this month, but Carmichael acknowledged that it speaks to a different era of his life.Ĭarmichael said he came out to his longtime writing partner Ari Katcher shortly before “Home Videos,” and initially planned to come out to his mother on camera. The next year, Carmichael’s narrative directorial debut “ On the Count of Three,” in which he plays a frustrated young man in a suicide pack with his unhinged buddy (Christopher Abbott) premiered at Sundance. That was followed by a companion piece, “Sermon on the Mount,” where the subject matter doesn’t come up at all. In 2019’s “Home Videos,” Carmichael interviews his own Wintston-Salem, North Carolina family as a microcosm of the Black family experience, and casually mentions to his mother that he’s made out with men.
While “The Carmichael Show” solidified his blend of comedy and wry social observation, a series of subsequent works have deepened his interpersonal quest to put his true self on camera.
The seeds of “Rothaniel” are actually strewn throughout Carmichael’s work and, the more he talks about it, the clearer it is that he has spent his whole career setting the stage for this moment. “It just kind of sparked that way.”Ĭarmichael hosted “SNL” the week of the special’s release and has been bathing in praise for it ever since, but has been dreading this moment for much longer. “I was planning on doing something around coming out but it was closer to Spalding Gray than traditional standup,” he said. Though “Rothaniel” arrived as a revelation when it dropped on HBO in April, the comic had been thinking through the potential of revealing his sexuality through his work for quite a while.
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