How to Get Away With Murder: Jack Falahee Talks About His Racy Sex Scenes—and How He Gets Into Character

The actor insists he didn't know his same-sex romps would cause so much chatter

Jack Falahee insists he had no idea sex scenes with Conrad Ricamora on How to Get Away With Murder would get as much attention as they have since the first episode premiered in September.

"When I read the pilot, I just read Connor as a multifaceted honest, real character," Falahee told me at the Savannah College of Art and Design television festival aTVfest in Atlanta. "I wasn't really thinking about the fact hat he's gay. So when I got to the sex scene between him and Oliver, I was like, 'Ok,' and I kept reading. It wasn't until the day after the pilot aired that people started writing about it and I thought, 'Oh, maybe we haven't seen this before on network television.

"But then again," he added, "I also don't own a TV so I didn't realize it was groundbreaking for a network—but apparently it was."

Falahee recently made some more headlines when he refused to say if he was straight or gay during an interview with gay magazine Out.

"I don't think answering who I'm sleeping with accomplishes anything other than quenching the thirst of curiosity. And moreover, it seems reductive," he told the mag. "It's been really interesting to be in the middle of the industry's fascination with the individual, because I never thought about that growing up or when I was at acting school. No matter how I answer, someone will say, ‘No, that's not true.' We still live in this hetero-normative, patriarchal society that is intent on placing everything within these binaries. I really hope that—if not in my lifetime, my children's lifetime—this won't be a question, that we won't need this."

And then during a panel a HTGAWM panel at aTVfest, he said he doesn't use his real life to get into character.

"I actually as an actor don't draw on life experiences," Falahee said.

He explained that he studied Lee Strasberg's method of acting, which uses memories to inform a role, but "I found it didn't work for me because I found myself going a little nuts. To be sad, I would think about a friend dying and I felt that was a fast track to therapy."

Instead, he prefers Stella Adler's acting technique "where you create fictitious circumstances" that have nothing to do with the actor's personal life.