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THE FUNNY MAN
The first time I saw Alec Mapa perform, he gave me a stomachache. It was during a musical interlude in his one-man show, An Evening With Alec Mapa, in which he twirled, beaming, through a Solid Gold dance routine while a pair of tragic, cigarette-smoking, too-big-for-their-hot pants male backup dancers stumbled behind him onstage. The audience was doubled over in hysterics. The bit ended as Mapa eventually realized how low-rent his backup dancers were—which was, as he would have it, a symptom of his professional career to date.
He shouldn’t have been so hard on himself. By that time, he already had a successful run on the UPN sitcom Half & Half and a very well received one-man show, I Remember Mapa. That show, which was a coming-out of sorts, was about his travails after he hit it big right out of NYU drama, getting cast in the Broadway production of M. Butterfly, originally as B.D. Wong’s understudy—and his perplexing dearth of roles afterwards.
“[I Remember Mapa] was the turning point for me,” the actor says on the phone today, rushing to make his call for the upcoming film You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, written by Hollywood’s new golden boy of comedy, Judd Apatow. “In terms of, I’m not going to worry about it anymore. And it’s so ironic that I always worried about the effect coming out would have on my career, when the truth turned out to be that I really didn’t have one until I did.”
He’s right. Since he came out, he landed the Half & Half role, guest appearances on many other sitcoms and rounded up last TV season with a recurring stint on Desperate Housewives, playing Eva Longoria’s close friend and personal shopper, Vern. (“Marc Cherry says I’ll be back this season!” he says.) And this fall, he nabbed a juicy recurring role on the hit show Ugly Betty, playing fashion reporter Suzuki St. Pierre.
“With me, it was the first authentic voice I had to offer,” he continues, regarding his coming-out. “It empowered me in a way I hadn’t realized, for the simple fact that it freed me up because I wasn’t worried about what other people thought anymore.”
Empowered so much, in fact, that his role on Ugly Betty recently marked another milestone in his career: he didn’t need to audition. In the phone-call-away style of those who’ve actually made it in the industry, he was asked last-minute to perform stand-up comedy at this year’s GLAAD awards in Los Angeles. Sitting in the audience was all of Hollywood, including Betty producer Marco Pennette and the show’s casting director. As Mapa explains, after he went offstage, the casting director turned to Pennette and said, “Well, that role is cast!”
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“My goal is to get more work with as little effort as possible,” Mapa says winkingly. “So to be asked to do something is just the best thing ever. Without having to audition. It’s an embarrassment of riches, is what it is.”
Another first came this year when Mapa was asked to do a season’s worth of entertainment on the Atlantis gay cruise line. He had never been on one before—this year alone he’s been on six.
“I’ve gone all over the world,” he says, gushing about the experience. “[On the cruise], everybody’s really game about the prospect of creating a community where we’re so much nicer to each other than we are on land.” He also performed on Rosie O’Donnell’s R Family cruise line this year, which struck a chord with him since he and his partner, Jamison Hebert, are seriously exploring their options for adopting a child of their own.
“One day we’re going to look back on this time and think, Oh my God. Gay families had to go on a boat into the middle of the ocean in order to be themselves!” he says. Thankfully, he was able to enlist some high-powered help. “[Rosie]’s an absolutely devoted mother. When she found out that my partner and I are thinking of adopting, her eyes lit up, and she gave me her personal e-mail address and everything.”
This has been a good year for Mapa, and one thing that he’s learned through his ups and downs is how to put it all in perspective. “I think I have been really fortunate in that I have been helped along the way,” he explains. “I think the difference is that when I first started out, I saw my ethnicity and my sexuality as being disabilities. And now they’re assets. Because that’s something I have to offer that nobody else does.”
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