𝗗𝗶𝗼𝗿 sweater, shirt, and belt; 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶 pants.

Benito Skinner is a little hot and bothered. On a sweltering June day in Toronto, the actor and comedian admits he’s developed a bit of a crush on the city. Not with its skyline or its sports teams. Not even with its Pride celebrations, which, aside from a visit to legendary gay bar Woody’s, he’s barely had time to experience while filming the second season of his hit comedy Overcompensating.

Instead, he’s down bad for Yorkville’s cafés. “Me and Nutbar, we’ve got this crazy sexual tension,” the 32-year-old says, flashing a mischievous grin. “Balzac’s—can we talk about the name? Huge for me. Do you see? There’s a pattern here. I wonder if I’m horny in Toronto.”

Thom Browne look.

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If he seems a little overstimulated, there’s a reason. Skinner has been running on caffeine and adrenalin for weeks. Overcompensating premiered last year to rave reviews. Shooting the second season in Toronto has been a high-pressure sprint: tight schedules, big set pieces, and days that blur into one another. Still, he doesn’t sound exhausted so much as locked in. “This season feels even bigger and gayer and sadder and sexier and cringier. We’re just going for it in every way,” he says.

Produced by industry heavyweights like A24, Charli XCX, and Jonah Hill, the Prime Video series, which Skinner created, writes, and stars in, follows Benny, a closeted ex-football player whose first year of college starts to unravel the carefully constructed douche-bro façade he’s spent his life performing. It’s semi-autobiographical, based on his own experience as a gay male cosplaying as a golden-boy jock. “I didn’t do theatre, because I knew everyone would be like, ‘Well, he’s gay.’ So I did football, which I didn’t mind,” Skinner says of his high-school days. “I found the things that could still feel performative but also be understood as masculine. And that is where I hid for a long time.” Years later, Skinner would become a social media star during the pandemic, better known as Benny Drama on TikTok and Instagram, with unhinged impressions, including yassified Kardashians, a vocal-fried Shawn Mendes, and an entire ecosystem of chronically online archetypes. Even then, he says, he was interrogating performance itself: who gets to do it, and what it costs to stay in character.

If Season 1 of Overcompensating was about Benny slowly learning to drop the Chad mask, Season 2, Skinner says, is less interested in restraint. “The response to the show really kind of electrified and lit a fire under me,” he explains. “We shot like eight sex scenes in a day the other day, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re making some smut too.’ How fun is that? What a gift. Prime said, ‘Light it up, gay boy!’ He adds, “I really think it’ll make people happy. And in this cruel, sick world, that’s all I want.”

Skinner built his career off of making people laugh by pretending to be everyone else—pop stars, reality-TV figures, the kind of girls who blame their toxic traits on being a Scorpio rising. But the project that’s transformed him into one of comedy’s most exciting new voices isn’t built on imitation. It’s rooted in the one person he spent years trying to deny: himself.

Now, he’s leaning into that truth more than ever, and putting his back into it.

Hermès sweater and shoes; CDLP briefs; Campbell’s of Beauly socks.

Ferragamo look.

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Skinner grew up in Boise, Idaho, the youngest of four siblings in a household he describes as loving and supportive. But outside the home, he says, things shifted early. “It was really lovely until I got into grade school and people started calling me a faggot,” he says. “I think I had fun until that moment.” School became a place of self-editing. Whatever felt too expressive, too theatrical, too visible got buried. “I got in my head, and I just stifled everything that made me happy as far down as I could,” he says. At home, there was refuge in movies and television. He watched SNL with his parents, memorized Lizzie McGuire monologues, and performed Britney Spears routines for his family. He chuckles about it now, but back then, performance was a form of survival. “Those things were my safe space, and I think they helped me to fall in love with storytelling,” he says. “I was so enamoured with being an entertainer, but it wasn’t something that I thought was on the menu for me because I was from Idaho, and that’s not a thing they tell you that you could be necessarily.”

Benito Skinner built his career off of making people laugh by pretending to be everyone else. The project that’s transformed him into one of comedy’s most exciting new voices isn’t built on imitation. It’s rooted in the one person he spent years trying to deny: himself.

So Skinner armoured himself with football, a space where performance was still central, just coded differently. He’d find ways to make it fun, eating candy he snuck into his thigh pads on the sidelines or embracing the theatricality of it all. “I’ve kind of got a wagon, so the pants meant the world to me,” he smiles. Looking back now, he sees something else in it too. “There is a homoeroticism to all of those things, and I think we play with that within this show,” he says. “Some of the gayest places I’ve been in my life were not gay clubs—they were football locker rooms. Straight guys talk about dicks way more than gay guys do.”

Still, he knows openness doesn’t exactly equal progress. Skinner describes a “complicated relationship” with his home state, where in recent years lawmakers have advanced measures restricting gender-affirming care and LGBTQ rights—part of a broader movement unfolding across parts of the United States and Canada. “Sometimes the coasts can feel like, ‘Well, why even make a show about coming out? Everyone’s so down for it now.’ And I just know that we don’t know what people are saying in locker rooms in Idaho still, because I have a hard time believing they’re that accepting, especially with what I’m seeing,” he says. “There is such a rise in hate that we can all feel—it just feels so real, and it’s scary.”

The answer, for Skinner, isn’t to make himself smaller. If anything, it’s a reason for the queer stories told in shows like Overcompensating and Heated Rivalry to get louder, freakier, and more unapologetic. “As entertainers, there is a duty that I personally feel to have real stories about queer people on TV and fight for them forever, and in no way shy away from honesty and love and beauty and showing the humanity of people,” he says. “So many really cruel people have lost humanity, and I want to give people hope.”

Hermès sweater.

For years, Skinner perfected the art of playing into the Abercrombie bro fantasy. He kept the jig going until senior year of college at Georgetown University in D.C. The turning point came when two queer canon events occurred almost simultaneously: he met his female best friend, and he caught feelings for a man. “I couldn’t hide from it anymore,” he says. “It was a lethal but beautiful combination of having a new friend who doesn’t know your past and is just meeting you where you are, and the feeling of like, oh my God, being in love.”

In Overcompensating, Benny finds his platonic soulmate in Wally Baram’s Carmen, a fellow freshman outsider who he bonds with over a shared love of Glee and Nicki Minaj. Together, they form a connection that, while imperfect, gives each of them room to finally feel like themselves. “I get the most comments from people telling me they have their own version of Carmen in their lives, which I think is the main heart of the show,” Skinner says. “This show is me trying to celebrate that relationship and what women have given to gay people for so long, which is this first safe space.”

When Skinner eventually fell in love, the experience arrived later than it often does but with no less intensity. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is why everyone is so obsessed with this. This is why people have made movies about this and written songs about it.’ I remember thinking, ‘Katy Perry spilled on Teenage Dream. I get it now.’” Something else happened at the same time. As he came out during his senior year, the creativity he’d spent years suppressing came rushing back. “I started writing sketches, and I started doing voices, and it all poured out of me—the wigs, the makeup, everything,” he recalls. And it has continued to over the last 10 years.

Hermès look.

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The Benny Drama cinematic universe unleashed a rogues’ gallery of chaotic, hyperspecific caricatures onto the COVID-era internet: Jenni the TMI hairdresser, Kooper the Gen Z intern, Grimes reimagined as a glitching Girl Scout. It wasn’t long before Madonna and Dua Lipa were following him, and the Biden administration was tapping him to encourage Americans to get vaccinated. Yet for all his shapeshifting, Skinner had been nurturing a far more personal story. The earliest version of Overcompensating debuted in 2018 as a live comedy sketch at the New York Comedy Festival, drawing directly from his years in the closet and the elaborate charade of trying to stay there.

Eight years later, that seed has grown into one of TV’s buzziest comedies—and with a second season on the way, Skinner is more interested in emotional truth than a neatly packaged coming-out story. “I wanted my honest experience of coming out, which felt very uneven and complicated, and at times really beautiful and like such a release,” he explains. “And then at other times, it was confusing and scarier than even being in the closet.”

One might assume Skinner is living as the most self-actualized version of himself: a hit show, a devout fanbase, a jawline that could launch a thousand thirst traps, and Charli XCX on speed dial. But even now, he says, the impulse to overcompensate hasn’t disappeared. “I’m still overcompensating, trust. That gay hate in your body, that never goes away. I think that it’s just a part of me, but I think it’s also a part of all of us, in moments of needing to be safe or feel loved. It’s about finding the people where you don’t think you need to, and there’s so much joy in that,” he says. “But oh my God, babe, it’s the fabric of me. I had to make a whole show about it.”

In many ways, the second season of Overcompensating became a place for Skinner to process that ongoing negotiation with himself. The year leading up to it was marked by major transitions: a move back to New York from Los Angeles, a breakup, and a period of figuring out who he was outside of the identities he had spent years performing. “I spent most of the year writing this second season in hotel rooms in New York, and it just felt like a time of change for me and a time of rediscovering myself and what I wanted to say and who I am as a person,” he says. “I feel like that’s all probably a part of the fabric of this season. I feel really lucky and privileged that I get to do that, to be able to have that outlet.”

That personal upheaval found its way into Benny, too. Skinner says the character enters the new season navigating his own evolution: “He, too, has to redefine who he is as a gay man and navigate that.”

Louis Vuitton look.

Season 1 ends on a collision-course cliffhanger, with Carmen accidentally outing Benny to both his sister Grace, played by Skinner’s real-life best friend Mary Beth Barone, and his crush, Rish Shah’s Miles. Season 2 picks up in the messy aftermath, as Benny learns that coming out is an ongoing process of figuring himself out. “I really didn’t want to shy away from the mess of coming out, because in so many things that I’ve seen, it can be one conversation, and then the whole school knows,” he says. “I had to realize that too in my life, that it wasn’t going to be one quick little convo and I’m done. You also have to explore who you are as a gay person and what that means to you.”

That exploration takes Benny to spring break, where things spiral into an EDM-fuelled fever dream featuring German DJ and musician Zedd. The episode, which Skinner says is “probably my favourite thing I’ve ever written,” taps into the nostalgia of 2016—a time when Zedd’s “Clarity” soundtracked the lives of a generation of college kids.

“I’m still overcompensating, trust. That gay hate in your body, that never goes away. I think that it’s just a part of me, but I think it’s also a part of all of us, in moments of needing to be safe or feel loved.” —Benito Skinner

The creativity Skinner kept bottled up through his teenage years has finally found an outlet, and it’s overflowing. He’s currently writing a script for a “gay buddy comedy” starring himself and his Overcompensating co-star, Owen Thiele. “We are just best friends, and we have such a fondness for each other and such a shared language of comedy,” he says. “It’s about two gay best friends who go on an on-the-run journey in the South.”

Skinner admits he’s living the kind of wild fantasy his younger self could scarcely imagine: executives aren’t asking him to dial back the queerness. They’re betting on it. “New voices are entering, and these iron gates of Hollywood are falling,” he says. “People want gay stories. They want all these stories. All of these belong on TV.”

Now, he hopes his work can offer someone else what Lizzie McGuire and Britney Spears once offered him: a blueprint for becoming themselves. “There are people in places like Idaho that could put on their TV, maybe when their parents go to bed… and you could maybe see yourself,” he says.

“I think that’s so beautiful. It’s giving real hope; it’s not fake. And so to get to be a little part of that history is just an honour of my life.”

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