Is Nick Offerman gay? A Closer look

The third episode of HBO’s Last of Us is a beautiful and tragic 80-minute love story between Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Bill (Nick Offerman). The game merely mentioned Frank and Bill’s relationship; the series explored it from delightful beginning to tear-jerking ending. 

Bill and Frank fall in love and build a life together over twenty years. Frank’s undiagnosed disease and Bill’s controlling nature threaten the relationship, but the couple remains united by love. Nearing the end of his life, Frank states he wants to die humanely; Bill, unable to envision life without Frank, chooses to die with his long-term partner. 

Despite playing a gay character, Nick Offerman is not gay

Nick Offerman’s opportunity to play Bill after Con O’Neill dropped out of production due to a scheduling conflict. Offerman, a straight man, had never played a gay role before. “Nick’s innate kind of newness to this helped,” co-creator Craig Mazin told Variety. 

Offerman’s character, Bill, had never been with a man before meeting Frank. Variety reports that Offerman had no qualms playing a gay character, even during intimate scenes. Offerman talked to Variety about filming Bill and Frank’s first sex scene:

“It’s the most intimate, private moment that you’re trying to create with a scene partner — you know, with 16 people standing four feet away, scrutinizing your every move. So that discomfort was easy to channel into the unease and vulnerability that Bill felt in that moment.”

Cinematographer Eben Bolter told Pink News that Offerman’s casting was perfect: “I felt there was a fragility to Nick as an actor and he was doing something new. I seem to remember seeing his hand shaking between takes on that piano seat. And I remember [thinking] ‘he’s so in it’, and that was the character, and that was him.”

Offerman is married to Emmy-winning actress Megan Mullally

Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly met in 2000 on a theater production of The Berlin Circle. Megan said it took some time before she warmed up to him. “I started thinking, ‘Wait a minute, he’s funny.’ And then I started thinking, ‘Wait a minute, is he cute?’ What’s happening?” Megan told Buzzfeed. 

Megan told GQ she thought Offerman was closer to her in age, only to find out that he was 12 years her junior. “I said these two words: You motherfucker.” she said. “And I almost ran my car off the road.”

A day before the Emmys in 2003, the couple’s friends attended what they thought was a pre-Emmys party. It was, in fact, Offerman and Megan’s wedding. The following day, Megan attended the awards ceremony in her wedding outfit. 

Offerman and Megan enjoy working together – they never spend more than two weeks apart. “We love working together,” Megan told USA Today. “If we drive together, if we share a dressing room, we know going into it that we’re going to get along. We’re very domestically compatible.”

In 2017, the couple told GQ that they tried to have children soon after getting married but didn’t conceive. “[We] took that to mean it wasn’t meant to be,” Megan said.