Ben Aldridge recently opened up about coming out not even three years ago on Instagram, and the ‘Knock at the Cabin’ star got a bit emotional looking back on his journey.
“Oh, you’re going to make me cry. It sounds dramatic, but I could just breathe easier. I underestimated how significant that was to me. I really did. I thought, it’s not that I’d played it down, but I didn’t know what it would do to me physically. And just for days afterwards I was like, ‘I needed that so badly,’” the 37-year-old English actor expressed during his appearance on Marc Malkin’s Just for Variety podcast.
He continued,
“I wasn’t aware of how much I needed to do that and how much I’d potentially hung onto, conveniently hidden behind. It just felt so — I felt so powerful. I felt so powerful to be able to stand alongside and be part of my community.”
“The journey to pride was a long one” for Aldridge, but he finally came out as gay on World Pride Day in 2020. The actor shared that throughout his 20s, he was taught that coming out might cost him work, but he still decided to push through what he described as “a calculated risk.”
“I made that decision going, ‘Well, if that’s gonna play against me in any way, I don’t wanna work with the people that are making those choices,'” Aldridge expressed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
He further shared what coming out has done for him as an actor stating,
“What [coming out] did do, I think, was align me in queer projects that I wouldn’t have necessarily been considered for. A journalist put it to me, ‘Do you feel like the universe has rewarded you for coming out?’ I don’t believe that it would reward me, but I think in being authentic, you interact with the world in a different way. Therefore, what comes back at you is also gonna be different. I have really relished playing gay men. It has given the work that I’m doing much more meaning. I’m meeting myself in my work.”
Aldridge starred alongside Jim Parsons in the 2022 gay drama/comedy film, ‘Spoiler Alert,’ and he is also playing as Jonathan Groff’s husband in the mystery/horror movie, ‘Knock at the Cabin,’ which is set to be released on February 3.
Sources: ew.com, variety.com
It pays as far as your mental health goes if you can be fully gay not having to live hiding. It gets extremely exhausting.