Benito Skinner knows a thing or two about trying to play it straight.
For his fourth-grade birthday party, he invited the boys in his class to go see Disney’s 2004 camp masterpiece “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” (“I was like, ‘It’s because Lindsay Lohan’s hot,’” he recalls wryly.) And on the high-school football team, the comedian remembers trying to pass off his pop-star obsessions as pure, red-blooded machismo.
“I was like, ‘Lady Gaga is sexy!’ But the guys in the locker room were like, the one from the ‘Alejandro’ video? She’s terrifying to us,” says Skinner, who has now funneled his real-life closeted chaos into Amazon Prime Video comedy “Overcompensating” (all eight episodes now streaming). “To be clear, Gaga is a goddess. But for straight guys, nothing could be scarier than a woman with a bob and red lipstick who’s actually expressing herself.”
Created, written by and starring Skinner, “Overcompensating” is a barbed, pop culture-savvy series about a college freshman named Benny (Skinner), who’s struggling to find himself as a young and confused gay man. He becomes fast pals with Carmen (Wally Baram), who after realizing they’re not sexually compatible, is content to just bond with him over ”Glee” and Nicki Minaj.
But not even Carmen is safe from Benny’s messy crosshairs, as he tells people that they’re hooking up in order to maintain his frat-boy appearance. Meanwhile, Benny is crushing on Miles (Rish Shah), his chiseled British classmate, and hiding his sexuality from his older sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone), who goes to the same university.
The show is guaranteed to be stress-inducing for queer viewers, many of whom can understand the crushing anxiety of lying to your best friends and bedfellows about who you really are.
“I want the sick stuff,” says Skinner, 31, who like his character came out during college. At that age, “you’re selfish at times, and maybe doing something really (messed) up to a friend, just out of safety and protecting yourself. It feels so true to me: I could be out in one room, but in another room, I would code-switch and do a deeper voice and find myself still hating this part of me. You’re performing so much.”
Barone remembers dating one of her best friends before he came out, and loves how Skinner captures the bluntness and vulnerability that Benny and Carmen share.
“I got to have that relationship, and I knew how special it was,” Barone says. “It starts off where you have that wall between you before the person comes out. But as you really get to know each other, you can be so honest and say anything and not feel judged.”
“Overcompensating” began as a standup show, which Skinner performed across the country in 2019. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he frequently went viral with his online persona Benny Drama, donning makeup and wigs as he impersonated celebrities ranging from Kim Kardashian to Billie Eilish. Those sketches ultimately helped him to hone his hyper-specific voice on “Overcompensating,” which references many of Skinner’s favorite touchstones as a kid growing up in Boise, Idaho. (The series opens, for instance, with a young Benny watching “George of the Jungle,” whose nearly naked star Brendan Fraser left a lasting impression.)
“The more specific, the funnier,” Skinner says. “Even if ‘George of the Jungle’ wasn’t your queer awakening, you can immediately slot in the thing you know. But also, coming up on the internet helped me realize that an attention to specificity is what people really responded to. If I did this tiny little thing where I put a Pepsi can in the back of a Kendall Jenner (video), that’s what all the comments were about.”
Baram admired Skinner’s strong vision: “He brought everything with every hat that he wore: as a boss, as a friend, as an actor,” she says. “I’ve never met anyone with more poised energy. My brain is exhausted looking at him.”
The acid-tongued comedy features myriad guest stars including Charli XCX, Bowen Yang and James Van Der Beek. Kyle MacLachlan and Connie Britton also pop in as Benny’s well-meaning parents.
Most memorably, Megan Fox appears as a poster on Benny’s dorm room wall, which springs to life during irreverent confessionals. The image is modeled after Fox’s lingerie-clad 2008 GQ magazine spread, which Skinner often feigned attraction to among his friends but really just found “so iconic.”
During college frat parties, “I remember being in these bathrooms and seeing these posters of Sports Illustrated models, being like, ‘Girls, what are we doing here? This sucks. I’m so sorry, darlings, I love you all,’” Skinner says. When it came time to write similar scenes for the series, he wanted Fox to be the fantastical embodiment of Benny’s heteronormative angst: “She is my idol. She’s brilliant, and people haven’t really allowed her to be as funny as I think she is in the show.”
For Skinner, who has been dating photographer Terrence O’Connor since 2016, “Overcompensating” was a chance to revisit a very tumultuous period of his life, but with newfound humor and understanding.
“It was so cathartic,” Skinner says. “I was able to forgive myself for not coming out sooner or feeling like I couldn’t. I always judged myself for that throughout my 20s, but then being able to perform this and feel like I had some power over it, I finally gave myself a little bit of grace. For so long, I was like, ‘Man, I wasted so much of my life,’ but I don’t think I did. I had my reasons and I’m proud of my experience as a queer person. Hopefully, other queer people see themselves in the show.”
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