“If we’re going to tell this story of overcompensating, when was I doing it the most?” asks Overcompensating star Benito Skinner. “Which is the first week of college: When did I start tiptoeing out of the closet and stop doing it so much?”
Skinner looks back on his own coming out experience in Overcompensating and gives one of the breakout turns of 2025 by revisiting his freshman year of college. The Toronto-shot comedy series, which debuts May 15 on Prime Video, offers a genuinely heartfelt, sweetly funny, and refreshingly raunchy coming-of-age and coming-out-of-the-closet story. Overcompensating follows Skinner’s character Benny as he faces a sexual awakening during frosh week.
Torn between his new bestie Carmen (Wally Baram), who not-so-secretly wants Benny to drop one F from their BFF status, and Miles (Rish Shah), the superhot British guy that he keeps encountering on campus, Benny finds his role as the all-American alpha male thrown for a loop in new territory. The story draws from Skinner’s work as a content creator and stand-up comedian by poking fun at how he leaned into macho stereotypes, like lowering his voice and policing his self-expression, to pass as straight, but ultimately learned to love and embrace being out and proud.
As a case in point, Skinner’s demeanour speaking with journalists virtually over Zoom illustrates just how much his performance as Benny accentuates that sense of overcompensating. Unfiltered, he’s an animated hand talker and loose with his mannerisms and expressions. “At that time, I was coming to my physicality from an athletic perspective. I was coming from playing football. So I started training two years ago for the part,” says Skinner on revisiting his straight-passing years. “Feeling this stiffness and this very masculine-presenting sports-forward version of myself would allow me to immediately get into it because that’s how I felt and how I thought I had to look at that time.”
Skinner says the project began when he received an email from the former New York comedy club Carolines on Broadway asking if he’d consider developing his online material into live comedy. “When I was thinking about what I wanted to say, it was this idea of overcompensating, of hunkering down for the long winter in the closet, and thinking about all the things I did to be loved and accepted, whether that be cringe or devastating or so funny,” says Skinner.
The star says that Benny certainly imitates life, but that Overcompensating liberally mixes fact and fiction. “I would say anything you see that pertains to my experience coming out was as honest and true as possible. I felt like I could go there,” says Skinner.
He adds that having Benny as a character gave him freedom to explore past actions and regrets more freely, just as performing under the stage/Instagram name Benny Drama let him blur lines. “I started my career in character, so I love writing characters. Once I had the relationships and some of the scenarios in college, [I could] build this world out and write it, and create new characters that could surprise me. I would say it’s loosely inspired by my college experience; intensely inspired by my experience coming out.”
Benny’s predicament proves all too relatable for young gay men who might have a close relationship with a female friend, which they in turn take advantage of to delay coming out. In the show, Benny and Carmen quickly develop an intense relationship, which inspires many of their new friends to assume they’re a couple. Benny’s quick to play up the angle. He’s all braggadocio and fibbing about scores with Carmen to impress his friends, while she struggles to understand her shifting reputation on campus.
Besides taking advantage of Carmen’s friendship, Benny delays coming out thanks to his is-he-or-isn’t-he interest in Miles. Benny’s gaydar isn’t fully formed yet, having spent years self-censoring his own mannerisms and desires. Skinner says that casting Baram and Shah in the roles drew from gut instinct responses the actors when they approached the show for other reasons.
Baram, he explains, originally joined Overcompensating as a writer, but perfectly matched his idea and description of Carmen. “Immediately, I wanted to tell her everything about myself. She felt that way too, and we just immediately clicked,” says Skinner. After a chemistry read, Skinner says he knew there was nobody else for the part. The pair effortlessly conveys the dual spark of platonic friendship and unrequited love.
The same goes for Shah, who initially auditioned for Peter, the boyfriend of Benny’s sister Grace, who becomes something of a super-macho mentor as Benny tries to win a spot in a coveted fraternity. “I watched [Shah’s audition] for three seconds and was like, ‘Get him on tape for Miles right now, today,’” Skinner recalls, adding that Shah’s British accent added layers of warmth and mystery. (Canadian White Lotus star Adam DiMarco instead brings Peter’s frat boy douchebaggery to life in the series.)
“The second [Rish] came on Zoom, we read this kind of flirty, very ambiguous doorway scene between us. He left the Zoom and Alli Reich from A24 was like, ‘Well, I’m uncomfortable. That was him,’” Skinner says, miming his executive producer getting hot under the collar by their harmony. “We were all kind of gulping. It was exactly what I wanted in that scene.”
But while Benny’s journey getting a feel for Miles’ interest drives the plot, the freshmen must constantly force themselves into these hyper-masculine performances while vying for coveted spots in Peter’s fraternity. Cue the inevitable beer pong, wizard staffs, and euphoric nights rocking out to Charli XCX (but not too much) as Benny and Miles navigate coming of age stereotypes.
It’s in this sense that Skinner’s unabashed queering of freshman year feels especially notable: the series delivers a cousin of the frat boy humour that helped define 1990s and early 2000s’ comedies where films like American Pie or She’s All That pushed the envelope for representations of youthful sexuality, but from which LBGTQ+ characters were wholly absent, unless they were the butt of a homophobic joke. In Overcompensating, Skinner turns the tables on guys whose machismo is their downfall.
While Overcompensating leans into the cringe-actor of early adulthood, Skinner says he enjoyed giving his college years a do-over. “I loved that I felt like I finally had power over it. I could control my voice and my mannerisms,” he observes. “And I could finally laugh at it and, at times, cry and have a cathartic experience of forgiving myself for not coming out sooner.”
Skinner says he especially enjoyed exploring the relationship between Benny and Carmen, which let him acknowledge a friend who helped him along the way. “That’s when I met my female best friend who I think really changed my life in every way, and saved my life,” he says, looking back on his first week of college. “That relationship between gay men and women was the whole spark of the show. And, I think, is the love story of the show.”
