Rainbow Crew is an ongoing interview series that celebrates the best LGBTQ+ representation on screen. Each instalment showcases talent working on both sides of the camera, including queer creatives and allies to the community.
Next up, we're speaking to Tore creator, writer and star William Spetz. Spoilers follow.
When Tore's father is suddenly ripped away from him, his world is quite literally torn into two. But William Spetz, who both wrote and starred in Tore, doesn't just focus on the pain of that separation.
Using grief as a springboard, this new Swedish Netflix original explores what happens when a young gay man loses his anchor and is suddenly forced to reckon with his identity within the wider queer community. So yes, there's a great deal of sadness, but there's also joy to be found, queer and otherwise. Plus, there's a sunflower penis at one point too.
Want to know what the deal is with that? Read on as Digital Spy meets Spetz to discuss his gorgeous feel-good/feel-bad comedy and where Tore's journey takes us across these six perfectly formed episodes.
Tore opens with the death of Tore's father, and the way it's handled will probably come as a surprise to viewers even if they know the premise of the show already. Why did you approach that pivotal scene in the way you did?
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Death comes into our life that way. That garbage truck is a symbol of what death is because it just comes into our lives from the middle of nowhere and it can rapidly take the most precious thing away from us. I wanted to to portray that in kind of a harsh way because that loss and that pain isn't sweet.
I want the audience to go into the same state of shock as Tore because his behaviour after that trauma is very weird, and it sets up the whole show where he is behaving quite irrationally. So I felt really strongly that we need to be there with him and it has to be a shock for us too so we can identify with his weird behaviour.
At the same time, Tore also includes a lot of lighter moments too, much like in real life, but you don't often see that darkness and light co-exist as naturally as it does here in this show.
That's the thing I love the most and it's the thing that I as a fan consume, the dramatic comedy thing. I feel like that's kind of close to how my life is so I want to tap into that, how pain and happiness and euphoria can co-exist.
For example, when Tore falls in love for the first time with the florist, you're almost more susceptible to falling for somebody or falling in love when you're in pain. That sense of love is the complete opposite of the pain so it becomes the perfect distraction. When I've been in pain and when I lost a person close to me, I just remember this moment where...
My grandmother was my best friend in the whole world. She got sick and she passed away in 2015. And it happened at the exact time Justin Bieber released his underwear campaign for Calvin Klein. My life was ripped apart and I had never felt a pain like that. The only thing that made me forget about that pain was that f**king photoshoot that Justin Bieber did. So I just got stuck on Instagram looking at those pictures because attraction to that picture was the only way for me to forget about my grief.
I think that clash is interesting and I think it's very human, so I kind of used that place I was in during those months as inspiration for writing Tore's journey.
Part of Tore's journey sees him exploring queerness and the gay scene for the very first time. A lot of queer people like Tore come to these things later in life because it can take us longer to understand ourselves. Can you tell us more about how Tore's trauma kickstarts this exploration and what it means for his wider journey?
As a queer person, I really identify with the "Late Bloomer" kind of thing. Many of us have that journey because when our straight friends are having their first kiss, we're like, "Who do I want to kiss?"
I wanted to highlight that part of the queer experience because it was like that for me.
With the queer theme of the show, people around me who haven't seen it say, "Oh, it's like that kind of show." For my whole life, I have identified with straight stories, straight love stories, because love is really loud. But the queer experience, paradoxically enough, is a very universal feeling. Because it's about wanting to be loved, but maybe being rejected, figuring out who you want to be while trying to be accepted. Going into a new room and being like, "Who do I want to be in this community?"
That kind of specific queer experience is very universal because I feel like we all go through that. It's just the queer space is heightened and more intense, but I hope people who aren't queer specifically can still identify with that journey, because we're all fucked up. We're all trying to find our way back home.
Tore isn't always likeable, but that's a good thing. No one can be likeable all the time, especially given what he's going through, but lots of shows would shy away from that.
The moment we start worrying about, "How do I make this character likeable?", that's the moment we lose the humanity in the character. It's easy to be a good person and it's easy to do the right thing when everything is fine, when you have the people you love and you know who you are. But it's the time when you lose somebody, when you lose yourself and you reject the people who love you the most. That's when you're defined for real.
Even though Tore's behaviour is often not that good, hopefully the audience will understand where he is coming from. As human beings, we have a tendency to self-destruct, it's a part of us, so when shit hits the fan, that's where our true humanity comes out. And it's not always pretty.
SPOILER WARNING: Specific episode spoilers are included from here on out, including a detailed discussion of the final episode.
Something we did like though was that trippy drug scene in episode two where Tore flies off the balcony and sees a penis sunflower [Laughs]. How did you come up with that?
All credit to the director, Erika Calmeyer, because I come from low-budget productions here in Sweden. I've never written anything that has actual budgets, so I didn't even write those things because it was like, "We can't afford that. We can't do that."
I limited myself creatively quite often because there was no time or resources. Suddenly, Erika comes in and says, "People make student films and they're visually amazing. So it's not about how much money we have."
The trip scenes are our portal into Tore's emotional life. The things he longs for that we see in his hallucinations are just a result of what he is not saying out loud, but what he's thinking about.
And the sunflower penis? All credit to my little sister who is 18 years old, and still lives in the small tiny town where I come from. I was at home at my dad's writing the scripts. And I was like, "I need this moment where Tore sees the guy he's in love with — they talked about sunflowers — and I want to make people understand that he longs for this kind of love."
She was looking at me like, "Why doesn't he just try to blow him, but his dick's a sunflower?" And I was like, "You're a genius." Then people are sitting working on it and I'm like, "This is my sister's stupid idea from her living room." I was really happy that her idea had survived all these layers of the process [Laughs].
There's another really memorable moment, this time in episode five, when Tore finally hooks up with Erik and it feels like this is going to be an incredible thing, but then it all goes downhill very fast when the boyfriend shows up. Between the blowjob tutorial beforehand and then how we physically see Tore finish masturbating, your show doesn't shy away from the realities of queer sex. Why did you go for this more realistic approach?
Having sex for the first time is very often having "sex-ish." It's this fumbling thing of like, "What have I watched on the internet? What did my friend say? And what do I want? What does he want?" It's a big mix of everything and it's nerve-racking. It was really important for me to tell that part of this story.
In the beginning, queer sex was maybe portrayed as a joke or something ugly and nowadays, it's often almost romanticised. It's a luxury problem to have. I want to be in the stage of queer evolution where it can be both because that's human experience.
That scene with Tore starts off as this beautiful thing and it is and then it goes wrong, but it still counts, those minutes, for me at least. In those four minutes, he got the guy he was in love with, and even though he's so much older, and he has this experience, those minutes still count, and it has to be beautiful.
Sometimes, voices in the process were like, "Make it funny right away or can it be wonderful through the whole thing?" But for me, sex and early sexual experiences can be a mix of both. Sex is so exposing and so naked, both physically but also emotionally. Tore needed to have that moment to come back to Lin, to come home to his best friend. He needed to be that humiliated where he had nothing, like he lost everything and hit that bottom.
Everybody can have their own feelings about it, but for me, that's what made him go back to Lin because he had that stuff on his stomach. You lay there. It's horrible. And that sense of shame. The only thing he needed at that moment was his best friend's arms around him, so it needed to happen like that.
That moment of healing leads into Tore's first-ever drag number where he gets up on stage and performs his sweet, awkward little heart out in the finale. It's a really beautiful, vulnerable moment. Talk us through it.
It was wonderful. It was so fun. Tore as a character, he doesn't have this dream of being a drag queen. I don't think it's that. The drag experience is his way into his grief and his acceptance process. For me, at least in my life, when I do something new or something scary or something big, that's when I want to call my grandmother and then I remember that she's no longer with me. So I feel like it connects to the dad.
The whole premise of the show at the start is you need to start doing stuff. You need to start experiencing the life outside and then in the drag scene and the performance, that's the complete opposite of where Tore started.
Seeing his dad is hopefully a sweet moment of, "Look how far I've come and you're not here." That drag performance element was the segue into seeing his dad again and thinking about his dad and smiling and not just thinking about the pain.
At the end, after Tore has rescued his dog MJ/Cher and jumps into the car with Lin, there's such a gorgeous catharsis with him feeling connected and happy again, all while in drag still. Why did you choose to end the season there?
Tore's been through so much and Lin has been through so much. Even the dog has been through hell with that little girl dressing her up. So I felt like when the audience has stuck with a story that's sometimes maybe a tough watch, the characters deserve a happy ending.
That doesn't mean the problem isn't going to start again the next morning when Tore comes home after stealing his dog back and breaking into this house and all that. Everything in his life is still a mess. But when we have these moments in life, these five minutes of euphoria? They can give us fuel for the next year.
You know those nights out with your friends where everything is perfect and everything is easy? On the surface, it's like, "Oh, we just went out dancing." But that night at this shitty karaoke place just builds you up. It's that kind of moment with Lin and his dog in the car. That's gonna help him keep going. I felt like the characters and the audience deserve that after this mess of a show we've been through.
Are you planning a second season or is this the perfect place to end Tore's story and leave this world behind?
I'm just trying to survive until October 27 [Laughs]. I just hope people watch it and that they can take something with them. I have all these ideas and stuff, but right now I'm just so grateful that it happened and I'm trying to just be grateful about what we had. If it's meant to be, I would love to, but at the same time, I have no idea.
I'm also the wrong person to ask this. It's not up to me.
Looking back, is there a queer show or film that's really stuck with you in particular, that really resonated with you and your experiences?
Call Me By Your Name ripped my insides out. I was like 22 or something when it came out. I had never seen a portrayal of falling for someone and loving somebody a little bit more than they love you. It's just such an intimate, beautiful portrayal of love and even if it doesn't work out, it still counts. That's what I really took away from that experience.
That scene with the dad when he has that speech saying just accept the pain and nurture the pain because it meant that you'd risked something, that you loved... That's one of those moments that really stayed with me. That movie really helped me in a lot of ways.
Tore is now available to watch on Netflix.
After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.
David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.
Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends.
As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.
