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In the first episode of Full of Shift, Nico Tortorella’s new podcast co-hosted with his wife Bethany Meyers, the Younger star opened up about his decision to update his pronouns. After previously using they/them pronouns, the actor will now use he/him, he announced on the premiere episode, which aired on September 10.
“I use he/him pronouns at this point,” Tortorella said, pointing out that his wife, Bethany, also uses she/her pronouns after previously using they/them. “Not to say that we’re, like, opposed to they/them pronouns... I just really don’t care about it in the same ways that I did back in the day.”
He added, “I feel like a man more than I ever have in my entire life right now. I fucking stand by that. It’s such a great feeling. That’s not to say that I won’t feel more fluid in the future.”
“Call me whatever you want,” he continued. “Just make sure you call me.”
Tortorella said that the pronoun shift happened around the time the couple had their first child, Kilmer Dove, as well as during Meyers’ pregnancy with their second child. The pair’s experiences with infertility also contributed to Tortorella’s shifting mindset, he said.
“There’s something that happened in our infertility, where we were just experiencing roadblock after roadblock after roadblock,” he said. “And the pronoun conversation was this unnecessary roadblock that we were continuing to face head on.”
Meyers also talked about her own pronouns, saying that people would often trip up on using they/them, leading her to revert back to she/her. “I’m like, ‘Baby, I’m just trying to get a drink and have a conversation with you and talk,” she said. “It started to get in the way of my connections with people.”
At one point, Tortorella said that his nonbinary identity and his acting were intimately related, as well. “There was something about gender and sexuality that allowed me to grow as a person first, but also as an actor,” he said. “It can even sound like I was an actor playing a role as a nonbinary person for so many years, or as a queer person, and now all of a sudden, I’m like a dad, and I’m playing this cishet role… but both of these things can exist at the same time.”
Tortorella later responded to the backlash regarding his updated pronouns on his Instagram stories. On Monday, the actor posted a video of the comments under an Instagram post from the outlet Queerty, showing commenters accusing him of being a “culture vulture” as well as “queer baiting everyone for clout.”
“This is what is wrong with this community. The gatekeeping. The cattiness. The ignorance,” he said. “When the bullied become the bullies.”
He added, “I’ve never been happier and y’all are still mad. No surprises here. I appreciate the ones who recognize the shifts. This is full of shift.”
Tortorella and Meyers, who are also polyamorous, shared the details of their 2018 wedding, exclusively with Them at the time. Tortorella originally came out as genderfluid in a video with Them in 2018. In 2016, the New York Post’s Page Six published a story reporting Tortorella said he was sexually “fluid” at an event hosted by American Express. During the September 10 episode of Full of Shift, Tortorella said that headline came as a surprise because he did not realize he had talked to a reporter at the party.
“I remember getting a phone call from my publicist at the time being like, “Code red!” he said.
“I knew very very little about any of this language and the terminology,” he added. “When this came out, I was like, ‘I need to learn more.’”
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