2023 Rewind: Meet Zane Phillips – The Out Hunk from Netflix's 'Glamorous'

This piece is part of EDGE's 2023 Rewind series. We're reaching into our archives and sharing some of our favorite stories from the past year.

"It fucking rocks, being queer," says actor Zane Phillips, who is currently playing Kim Cattrall's himbo, gay son on Netflix's "Glamorous," the series that premiered on June 22 with ten episodes.

The show offers a take on a "Devil Wears Prada"-like scenario, with Cattrall playing Madolyn Addison, a corporate diva who runs struggling cosmetic company Glamourous. She hires Marco Mejia, played by non-binary actor Miss Benny, as her assistant in order to help the company become relevant in a fluctuating industry. Phillips plays Chad Addison, the company's head of sales, who assures his mother that he's "gay, but not, like...gay" when he sees Marco's femme attire on his first day of work.

But in a very open conversation with DigitalSpy, Phillips assures us that he is "like...gay."

"It's silly and stupid and the most fun that you'll ever have in your life. It's meaningful. It's community building. It's all these things that I think a lot of us have come to understand as we've gotten older and gotten to become fuller versions of ourselves," Phillips says.

The 28-year-old hunk first caught attention appearing in "Fire Island" and with his role on "Legacies" (on the CW). He recently told Gay Times that Chad, his "Glamorous" character, fulfills the classic teen movie villain with the quaffed hair and constant sneers. But, he adds: "Over the course of the season, you get to understand why he is that away. He's not all sneers."

He adds to DigitalSpy: "Chad is a send up of that classic '80s and '90s trope of the blonde, rich douchebag. That's the kind of archetype we're drawing from, but this time we get to queer it up a little. So obviously there is a little bit more of a homosexual twist to a lot of the suiting and what he wears.

"But I think it's also a send up of a very specific kind of a person that we see in the community, which is that they are overachieving, they are hyper concerned about how they look. They are hyper concerned about their place within the community itself... [T]here's this whole concept of the best little boy in the world, about how, for certain gay guys, we grew up wanting to be good at everything. So I think part and parcel with that is the Ken doll of it all."

While Chad may be out, he's not truly out within himself, which Phillips sees as a characteristic of this personality type in the community. "I think a lot of them still have this fundamental discomfort with who they are and with the idea of letting go of some of these gender norms... Especially with Chad, he has an absent father figure so he feels like he has to live up to this to this absent person in his life and his mother's life. What was fun about this season was we even got to see a little bit of a progression... Can you imagine him in heels at the start?"

The buff actor calls Chad "a total body fascist. So we've got to live up to that. It's not going to make sense if he's not that sort of ideal vision that certain people have." Meaning casting agents who describe these super-fit characters with terms like "This person should have a godlike body."

"A lot of the time, I think to myself, 'I don't know how to live up to that, but I'm gonna try my best,' " says Phillips. "It's not something that gets talked about, but that's a really hard thing to maintain. Just in life already, but then you're filming however many hours a day, however many days a week... I woke up early in the morning, I'd get home late at night, the gym would be open for one more hour and I'd be like, 'Well, I guess I gotta go.'

"There's pressure upon me to make sure that the character is represented well. I'm hoping I did that. I mean, we can always find issues with our bodies and with ourselves on screen, but I will say it's something that I think certain folks take for granted, that it's just something that you can do. No, actually, it takes a lot of hard work, and it's really hard to fit that in with the life that we're living while filming.
These Marvel people get fricking trainers all the time. And the rest of us are just having to sort of do our best. Going to the lunch buffet and being like, 'I guess I'm just getting chicken.' "

Check out pics from Phillips' Instagram: