one of the scream killers says strangers keep telling him he was their queer awakening. his answer at comic con has us screaming (sorry).

Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via BuzzFeed and SciFiNow

"People approach us all the time like, 'You are my queer awakening.'"

That is Matthew Lillard, who played Stu Macher in Scream, on the Empire Stage at New York Comic Con on Friday, at a panel called "Ghostface Forever: The 30th Anniversary of Scream." Skeet Ulrich, who played Billy Loomis, was sitting next to him, along with Jamie Kennedy and Lee Waddell, the stuntman who played Ghostface, per The Pop Insider. The question was whether any fan reaction over 30 years had shown the cast their work meant more than they thought. Lillard said absolutely, and then said this, which we transcribed from BuzzFeed writer Spencer Althouse's clip:

"I think that it's super powerful that our relationship to these characters has nothing to do with them being gay. But if it means something to a kid out there somewhere who's like, oh, I feel seen in this relationship, then it's important for us to hold that space for this idea that there were these queer icons. We were not doing queer on the day, but we're here for it 30 years later."

Somebody on stage then yells "We're doing it now!" BuzzFeed, whose writer was in the room, says it was Ulrich, with his arm around Lillard. Thirty years of fan fiction, vindicated in one arm.

It is not the first time Lillard has gone there. At a convention last September he called Billy and Stu horror's first gay couple, PinkNews reported. The Comic Con version is gentler and, honestly, better: he does not claim they played it gay, he just declines to take it away from the people who saw it. That is the whole correct answer to "is this character gay," and most actors still fumble it.

Lillard came back as Stu in Scream 7, which opened to a franchise-record $64.1 million earlier this year. So the queer awakening is, at minimum, a recurring one.