Fire up the soft blue and red lights, because white Calvin Klein-clad heartthrob Jeremy Allen White is set to star and executive produce a bisexual romance series for Netflix based on the André Aciman novel Enigma Variations. The Bear star — part of the Rat Boy Summer craze of 2024 — is parleying his ascendance as a sex-symbol into a more intensely and progressively sexual role. White will star as Paul, the novel’s protagonist, in the limited series that recounts the loves and lusts of Paul’s life across his worldly travels. And it’s exactly the sort of bisexual representation we need right now.
Related
The Boss approves of Jeremy Allen White’s acting and singing in the upcoming biopic ‘Deliver Me from Nowhere.’
The official synopsis of Aciman’s novel is as follows:
‘Enigma Variations’ charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where, as a boy, he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men – whether he’s on a tennis court in Central Park or on a New York sidewalk in early spring. Paul’s attachments are un-graspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire. Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later, we discover who we’ve always known we were.
The Rise of Bisexual Representation
LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream films and TV has been pretty marginal at best over the last century, but has thankfully picked up in the last 20 or so years, as more queer themes, characters, and stories have gotten a voice in media of all kinds. Bisexual individuals are a little bit harder to come by as leads in the media given certain prejudices held against them, and have suffered bi-erasure in the culture at large. However, over the years, we have seen them in various roles on TV, with many stars coming out as bisexual in recent days, too. Aciman is doing his part to bring bisexual leads into the mainstream, as his previous novel-turned-film, Call Me By Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, was a critical hit that also features bisexual main characters.
Amanda Kate Shuman is attached to serve as writer, executive producer, and showrunner on Enigma Variations. Her previous writing work includes The Blacklist and The Wheel of Time. White, to date, has two Emmys and three Golden Globes for his role as Carmy on FX’s The Bear. Enigma Variations is being developed at Netflix, and no release date has been announced. In the meantime, feel free to re-watch Call Me By Your Name or the first season of The Bear and dream a little dream about your favorite rodent boyfriend making out with his many, many paramours.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb