Hung star Thomas Jane has spent an awful lot of interview time lately talking about his dick—though to be fair, such are the consequences of starring in a show about dicks. In much the same way that, say, everyone is currently asking Moneyball star Brad Pitt if he’s a big baseball fan, interviews with Thomas Jane have a way of inevitably winding around his penis, a pattern that has occasionally caused Jane some trouble. For example, he recently told Vulture that he’d warned HBO, “The year I end up with a penis in my mouth is the last year of the show,” which sparked an inevitable backlash from members of the gay press.
But according to Jane, who elaborated on that whole penis brouhaha for the L.A. Times, his original comment—which he immediately ameliorated by declaring it to be a joke all in “good fun”—just stems from his close relationship with Hollywood’s gay community, which dates back to when he himself was just another homeless teenager hustling the streets of L.A.:
Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, you're going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don't accept people's sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn't have any money and I was living in my car. I was 18. I wasn't averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?
Jane continues that he was “a lot more open to experimentation as a young man,” and is grateful that, having hailed from a “middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing,” he was able to challenge himself on his natural prejudices, all because he was “hungry enough” to accept that youthful experimenting with sandwiches. Why, who knows what sort of life full of dull, white-bread sandwiches he might otherwise have lived? “It blew the doors off of my conventional upbringing and thinking,” Jane said of the many sandwiches that the men of Los Angeles introduced him to, adding that the experience made him far more confident in choosing what sorts of sandwiches he would enjoy in the future—even though some would argue that it’s not really a choice, and you’re born knowing what kinds of sandwiches you prefer.
Still, while Jane acknowledges that he definitely prefers one type of sandwich now “because that’s what my DNA dictates,” he believes that it was important to allow himself a variety of sandwiches in his formative years, because “up to a point, it’s a choice.” Jane then concluded, “Until you've tasted the food, you don't know whether you'll like it or not, as my mom always said”—talking about sandwiches, yet, like every Thomas Jane interview, also talking about dick.