Dispatch • Greg Berlanti, Billy Porter, Zach Braff, and Mickey Liddell on 25 Years of 'The Broken Hearts Club'

About midway through The Broken Hearts Club, Jack (John Mahoney), the patriarch of the film’s chosen family, gently gathers the whole movie into a single thought during a kitchen conversation with Patrick (Ben Weber). “Everybody can’t be the same, Patrick. Everybody can’t be straight. Everybody can’t be beautiful,” he says. “Some people are just gay and average. We’re the strongest, I think.” In 2000, that quietly devastating observation about queer life held a plain truth rarely spoken so directly in American cinema. Twenty-five years later, the line still lands.

On April 25, a 25th anniversary benefit screening in West Hollywood for Pride House L.A./West Hollywood, which supports LGBTQ+ athletes for the 2028 L.A. Olympics, brought the film back to the neighborhood where it was shot, with veteran entertainment editor Jess Cagle moderating. Writer and director Greg Berlanti joined producer Mickey Liddell, Billy Porter, and Zach Braff to revisit the making of the film and its legacy.

The Broken Hearts Club follows six gay best friends—Dennis (Timothy Olyphant), Cole (Dean Cain), Benji (Braff), Patrick (Ben Weber), Taylor (Porter), and Howie (Matt McGrath)—navigating the West Hollywood dating scene under the watchful eye of Jack (Mahoney), the fatherly proprietor of the restaurant where some of them work. The film was inspired by Diner, the 1982 Barry Levinson film Berlanti had long admired. “I always used to say, why doesn’t someone write the gay Diner?” Berlanti recalled. “So I sort of sat down and started doing that.”

At the time, few in film were doing that. Queer visibility on TV had made real strides—Ellen, Will & Grace—but film lagged behind, and the films that did exist often shouldered the weight of the genre’s history: the angst, the Freudian undertow, the sense that a gay movie had to justify its own existence by confronting the hardest possible version of gay life.

Berlanti sought a different film entirely. He wanted to portray the families that gay men actually made, the friendships that could become one of the great rewards of coming out, and a world in which queerness could be ordinary and flourishing rather than perpetually under cultural siege. As Braff recalled Berlanti framing the gap he wanted the film to fill: “Some of my friends are completely straight-acting. You would have no idea. They look like frat boys with baseball hats backwards. You would have no idea they were gay. No one’s ever made a movie for them.”

That the film exists at all is largely Liddell’s doing. Berlanti was a broke writer who had written eight or nine movie scripts that, as he recalled, nobody had read. Then his latest screenplay began circulating under the title Eight by 10s, a reference to the headshots actors carried. Liddell, then producing a film called Go, read it and sought Berlanti out. “I remember reading that saying, what is this?” Liddell recalled. “He doesn’t waste a word, a page. … I just love everything about it.” Over dinner, he made Berlanti an unexpected offer: he could direct it himself, and Liddell would produce it. Berlanti, who had never directed a feature, said “Yes.” As Berlanti put it, both his career and the film would not exist without Liddell.

It was, in retrospect, the beginning of one of the most prolific careers in American television. The script had already landed Berlanti a job on Dawson’s Creek; the film would announce his instinct for ensemble storytelling, emotional generosity, and his gift for giving audiences characters they recognized before those characters recognized themselves. Everything that followed for him—the superhero franchises, the prestige dramas, the ensemble stories made around people still waiting to see themselves onscreen—traces a line back to a film shot in 15 days in the neighborhood where it was set. The belief underneath all of it was already fully formed: that ordinary lives also deserve the full weight of a story, told with care. Berlanti didn’t develop that conviction over the course of a career; he arrived with it.

Porter’s audition took place on a Sunday night in a hotel room, an unusual enough setup that he broke the ice by alluding to the casting couch. “I’ve never been to an audition on a Sunday night,” Porter recalled telling Berlanti then. “He laughed, and I knew I was in.”

But getting Porter into the room at all required some reevaluation. Taylor had originally been written as white, blonde, and blue-eyed. Porter’s manager pushed for him; Berlanti agreed to see him. What Porter brought to the role wasn’t just comic precision but a kind of authority the character needed. Taylor is the one who speaks directly, even when it stings, and whose heartbreak turns into one of the film’s most genuine moments of feeling.

Porter understood, even then, what it meant to step into a role that had no precedent for him. “I [had] never really seen a representation of myself in the zeitgeist in this way,” he said. Watching himself onscreen changed something—not just what he saw, but what he thought was within reach. “It was really me changing my own life. To watch myself on the screen and go: right, that’s it. And I have to keep doing that and not be afraid of that. Because it was tricky. And it still is.”

The anchor of the film, both onscreen and behind the scenes, was John Mahoney, who played Frasier’s gruff retired cop dad, reimagined here as a gentle father figure who sponsors the softball team, dispenses wisdom in the form of cobbler, and holds the whole chosen family together. Berlanti wrote the role with Mahoney specifically in mind, sending the actor a letter. Mahoney accepted, and his commitment helped get the movie greenlit.

What Mahoney gave Berlanti on set was more than a deeply felt performance. Shooting the kitchen scene—the one where Jack puts on the dress—Mahoney turned to the first-time director afterward and told him, simply, he had this. “His confidence in me really helped me sort of make it through the rest of the movie,” Berlanti said. Mahoney died in 2018. His absence was audible in how Berlanti spoke about him—a tenderness reserved for people who believed in you early.

The film shot in October 1999, screened at Sundance in January 2000, and opened that fall. Braff has a story that captures the strange scale of that moment. While the film played at the old Sunset Five, he was still waiting tables at Le Colonial, a French Vietnamese restaurant in West Hollywood. Audiences who caught a showing wandered in afterward for dinner. “I would wait on them,” Braff remembered. “They’d be like, ‘We just saw your movie.’ And I’d be like, ‘Oh, thank you. Let me tell you about our specials.’ Only in Hollywood can someone go see a movie and then have one of the stars of the movie wait on you for dessert.”

The Broken Hearts Club became a cult classic and a lifeline, a movie people returned to when the world felt less kind. Liddell described hearing those stories for the first time, and still hearing them now. “People came to me and said, ‘This changed my life… I hid in my bedroom and watched it over and over and over again,’” he said.

Braff also heard versions of that: men who said they’d never seen themselves and their friendships represented that way, had never felt normalized in quite that register. And Porter, who knew better than anyone what it meant to see yourself missing from the culture and then find yourself there, spoke of the film’s impact on the Black queer community with the clarity of someone who lived both sides of it. “People’s lives were changed and saved and healed—and so was mine,” he offered.

For Berlanti, now one of the most prolific producers in the industry, the 15 days he spent filming The Broken Hearts Club were formative. “I remember each day so vividly, more than I remember whole years since, to be honest,” he said.

The Broken Hearts Club lasted because the people who needed it kept it alive, watching it in the dark and returning to it when they needed somewhere softer to land. That’s a legacy that extends well beyond a meaningful career breakthrough or box office story. It belongs more to what the film really captures: the bonds people form when the world feels too narrow—and the recognition that can make even lonely strangers feel briefly held.

Berlanti wrote about chosen family because it was the great gift his own coming out gave him. What he couldn’t have known then, sitting with a dwindling bank account as a struggling writer, was that the film would become chosen family for strangers he’d never meet: that a kid hiding in a bedroom somewhere might find it, find themselves in it, and feel a little less alone. That’s more than enough.