Somewhere, someplace, there must be tapes of the short-lived NBC prime-time soap "Titans" which had Casper Van Dien and John Barrowman cast as brothers and the sons of Victoria Principal and Perry King. It was maybe fall of 2000 and I watched EVERY episode. The eye candy was just Off. The. Charts. It was so bad it was GOOD!
That doesn't really have anything to do with anything except that I thought about it while reading a profile of Van Dien in the new issue of "Out" magazine.
He is playing a gay assassin in the MyNetworkTV telenovela-esque drama "Watch Over Me." Even though the show co-stars Van Dien's real-life wife, Catherine Oxenberg, they are obviously not romantically involved in the plot. So, does his character have a romantic interest on the horizon?
"I can't give too much up," the actor tells the mag. "But there's definitely interest."
But his kids won't be seeing daddy's work on this show: "No way! I don't care if they see if my character is gay. But I'm killing people left and right and I don't want my kids seeing me as a killer."
Well, we wouldn't want THAT.
So, even though Van Dien grew in a military family and graduated military prep school, he said his family was pretty liberal and probably would not reacted negatively if their blond and studly son turned out to really be gay.
"My mother would have been disappointed in me if I judged someone based on their sexual orientation. If I had been gay, my mother wouldn't have cared."
In addition to his work on "Watch Over Me," Van Dien is also preparing to reprise his role as Johnny Rico is "Starship Troopers 3" and is hoping he will be joined by Neil Patrick Harris, one of his co-stars in the original film. The actor wondered what all of the hoopla was about when Harris came out publicly as a gay man: "Was that a surprise to people? I didn't know it was that much of a surprise. He's a great guy and he's a great talent."