“Love, Victor” ramps up the drama in its Season 2 return to Hulu on Friday (June 11).
“Season 1 is [Victor] coming to terms with his sexuality and discovering ‘This is what I have to do’ and coming out,” series star Michael Cimino, 21, told The Post. “This season is more like, ‘Now that I am an out gay man, what does that mean to me and what does that mean to the rest of the world?’
“I think that that is a cool aspect that hasn’t necessarily been explored many times [on TV] before.”
Set in the same universe as the hit 2018 movie “Love, Simon,” the series follows high school student Victor Salazar (Cimino) as he comes of age on a journey of self-discovery.
In Season 1, he moved to a new school in Atlanta, joined the basketball team, made friends including goofy Felix (Anthony Turpel), got a girlfriend, Mia, (Rachel Hilson) and realized his feelings for Benji (George Sear) before finally coming out. His life gets more complicated this season.
As he enters his junior year at Creekwood High, Victor’s parents are getting separated and his mother is ignoring his revelation that he’s gay while his father deals with it by making awkward jokes. Mia, meanwhile, is broken-hearted as Victor navigates his new relationship with Benji and figures out his place in his school’s social world, as a gay star athlete.
“I definitely enjoyed digging into the dynamic of Victor being a newly out gay man in a relationship,” Cimino said. “Benji is much further along in his journey than Victor is, as far as accepting his sexuality. For Victor, Benji is like this all-knowing understanding person, and Victor is still kind of discovering what being gay means. Benji is being caring and loving but, at a certain point, there’s a limit to how much you can provide because it’s like, ‘I have limits too!’ So that’s a cool dynamic that we’re exploring.”
Aside from acting, Cimino is also a singer/guitarist — and “Love, Victor” will include that aspect of his life in the show’s ninth episode, featuring Victor doing some singing onscreen via karaoke.
“Honestly it’s so cool to mesh your passions together,” he said. “I have music [singles] coming out the 15th of June, too. I definitely don’t want to be the type of person where it’s like ‘I’m now just going to focus on music or acting.’ Both of them are fun outlets for me for different reasons. So, I want to be able to do both things and have them co-exist with one another.”
“Love, Victor” has had ample time to gather an audience since its premiere last summer, and Cimino has already had numerous fan encounters.
“I get a lot of messages, and sometimes when I bump into fans in real life we talk about [the show],” he said. “It’s heartbreaking but also inspiring to hear other people’s stories. People need to understand what it’s like to be part of the LGBTQ community. It’s such an honor to even have people reach out and feel comfortable enough to tell me their experiences because they watch the show. It means so much to me.
“The feeling is kind of indescribable.”