Steve Zahn started his career in theater Biloxi Blues, Bye, Bye, Birdie, and the off-Broadway Sopistry: "a beloved philosophy professor is charged with sexually assaulting a male student. Gay themes are starting early.
Both Steve and his costar Ethan Hawke were cast in Reality Bites (1994), about depressed Gen X-ers in Houston. Steve plays one of those endlessly depressed gay guys you see in movies of the era, who doesn't actually do anything gay except come out to his mother.
In a 1995 episode of Friends, we learn that Phoebe married a gay Canadian ice hockey player (Steve), so he can get his green card. Except he decides that he's not gay after all. Seems like a pattern developing.
I avoided Saving Silverman (2001), thinking that it was about a lesbian who changes to straight. That appears to be another movie: this Silverman is a guy about to make a disastrous marriage, so his friends try to reunite him with the Girl of His Dreams. One of the friends, J.D. (Jack Black), comes out and marries his high school Coach (R. Lee Ermy), but I think it's played for homophobic laughs. Steve plays one of the friends, who here is trying to become flexible enough to perform oral sex on himself. Just ask JD to do it for you.
More weird, experimental, and depressing bits followed, such as SubUrbia (1996): Steve plays Buff, one of a group of disillusioned teens in the bleak urban wastelands of the 1990s. I didn't live in a bleak urban wasteland, and there were no gay characters, so I couldn't relate.
In a 1995 episode of Friends, we learn that Phoebe married a gay Canadian ice hockey player (Steve), so he can get his green card. Except he decides that he's not gay after all. Seems like a pattern developing.
Next came The Object of My Affection (1998), which I didn't see because it seemed homophobic: a gay guy turns straight because women are so hot, but then goes back to gay again. Steve plays the gay-straight-gay guy's brother.
I avoided Saving Silverman (2001), thinking that it was about a lesbian who changes to straight. That appears to be another movie: this Silverman is a guy about to make a disastrous marriage, so his friends try to reunite him with the Girl of His Dreams. One of the friends, J.D. (Jack Black), comes out and marries his high school Coach (R. Lee Ermy), but I think it's played for homophobic laughs. Steve plays one of the friends, who here is trying to become flexible enough to perform oral sex on himself. Just ask JD to do it for you.
In the thriller Joy Ride (2001), Lewis (Paul Walker), traveling cross-country to pursue the Girl of His Dreams, of course, stops to pick up his estranged brother (Steve).
They run afoul of a road-rage driven trucker, but meet a girl for Steve to fade-out with. Plus they have to walk into a gas station nude.
More Steve after the break
