Actor Lukas Gage Shares his Coming Out Story

Out actor Lukas Gage opened up to tell his coming out story: It happened during an audition for "The Little Mermaid" in which he found himself confessing to having sex with his male neighbor, a buddy who started out as someone to play video games with and then became a friend with benefits.

Chatting on the "Seek Treatment" podcast with "Pat and Cat" – Pat Regan, who writes for the HBO series "Hacks," and Catherine Cohen, who stars in "The Lovebirds" – Gage recalled his first appearance on the podcast, when he was still closeted. That led to Cohen asking him to detail his coming out.

"Oh my god, it's actually a really good story," Gage said. "I had an audition for 'Little Mermaid,' the live action [remake] with [Sophia] Coppola, which didn't end up happening. It was in development."

"You are so Prince Eric!" exclaimed Cohen.

"I think that was the role," Gage said, before Regan congratulated him on being "multifaceted": "You can play straight!"

Gage went on to recall that during the audition he was asked to related "a vulnerable thing that happened for you... or what was a secret you were hiding, or something. I immediately started bawling," Gage continued, as Regan dan Cohen gasped in unison, "talked about how I'm sleeping with my neighbor – "

"Hot!" Regan exclaimed.

" – and hiding it from everybody, my whole family," Gage went on.

Regan instantly asked for details: "How old were you? ... What was the neighbor's deal?"

Saying he was nineteen or twenty at the time, the 28-year-old actor explained that he and the neighbor were "like bros, and we would listen to records and play, like, Playstation together."

Then the games took a turn, and the music became that of love.

"I just, like, kept coming over to his apartment," Gage related, adding that "after, like, a month or two he was like, 'All right, well, I'm going to kiss you now..."

Another gasp went up from the hosts, with Cohen crying, "Oh, that's hot!"

"Yeah," Gage agreed. "And we dated for three years!"

The two remain friends, with the ex now living in New York with someone new ("a nice boy") while Gage, famously, has been married to – and quickly divorced from – celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton. The actor recently starred with Jake Gyllenhaal in a remake of 1980s actioner "Road House," and has a role on "Dead Boy Detectives" as the supernatural Cat King, a feline deity with a crush on Edwin (George Rexstrew), one of the show's titular ghostly gumshoes.

Listen to the interview at this link. (Note: Gage is asked to tell his coming out story at the 36:10 mark.)