'Boots' Star Sachin Bhatt on His Sex Scenes: 'I Have to Represent the Hairy Guys'

Our own read, before anything else: gay television has gotten a lot more relaxed about showing gay sex than it has about showing the range of bodies gay men actually have. Sachin Bhatt has now done two of the more talked-about intimate scenes on streaming, and he talks about that gap directly.

“It's always liberating and nerve-racking! I'm not used to being shirtless or nude, but I have to represent the hairy guys out there,” he told Out. “Back in the day, they would always clean shaven or really trimmed down. I'm just trying to keep it real! Regardless of your age or ethnicity, social circles in the queer community can be challenging. It's hard to not compare yourself to other people.”

That last line is the part worth sitting with. He's talking about social circles. Our own view is that the comparison he's describing runs a good deal wider than that, and most readers will know exactly where.

The scenes in question. On Peacock's Queer as Folk, Bhatt played Ali opposite Eric Graise's Marvin, a bilateral amputee who hires Ali, a sex worker — a scene Out describes as being about disability, race and sex work, and notably not about anxiety. On Netflix's Boots, he played Major Wilkinson to Max Parker's Sgt. Sullivan, two Marines in 1990 conducting a relationship that would end both careers if anyone found out. Netflix cancelled *Boots* after a single season in December 2025, and Out reports Bhatt is grateful it got made at all: “I love playing characters that show the world that we are the same. Our stories matter! It's been a privilege and I'm going to keep doing it.”

Where he's going next is the interesting part. Bhatt plays Ezra in In Between, a debut feature written by and starring the Atlanta actor Nicholas Molencupp, who directed it alongside Juli-Ann De Barros. Ezra is the steady best friend to Molencupp's Nick — a man who, in the director's own summary to SaportaReport, is “too fat for athletic guys, and too thin for the chubby chasers.” Nick falls for Beau, who is confident and magnetic right up until he is embarrassed to be seen in public with him.

“It's me, it's my story,” Molencupp told the outlet.

Bhatt, in the same Out interview, called it a film dealing with “mental health, body image, and judgement within the LGBTQ+ community,” and framed the work in blunter terms than actors usually do: “As our voices are being suppressed, this is my active rebellion by telling queer stories and sharing our lives. We're here, queer, and staying here.”

It is also, genuinely, an Atlanta film. Molencupp decided to make it in August 2025 and had it shot inside a year — a 26-person cast on a 10-day schedule across 19 locations, funded past its target through grassroots fundraising and Indiegogo, with flyers handed out at Atlanta Pride in Piedmont Park. ArtsATL reports he partnered with local businesses — Boy Next Door Menswear, Midtown Butcher Shoppe, Lore on Edgewood and Woofs Sports Bar among them — describing the partnerships as an effort to build up LGBTQ+ spaces and community in the city. Most of those locations, Molencupp told SaportaReport, charged the production little or nothing. Producer Elle Army put the economics to SaportaReport plainly: “You couldn't drop in any city and just make it for what we made it for.”

One timing note, since the coverage reads differently depending on when it was filed. Out's July 28 piece — the most recent reporting on the film — says In Between is playing festivals now. The two Atlanta outlets that covered the production had it still in post-production: SaportaReport on June 23 and ArtsATL on June 26, with Molencupp, per SaportaReport, planning submissions to major and regional festivals and hoping to host a premiere at home. Five weeks is ample time to go from finishing a cut to screening it, so there's no contradiction there — only a gap we couldn't close. We found no announcement naming a specific festival, and the film's official site is still gathering addresses to share that news when it comes.

Molencupp's director's note, on that same site, draws a line we'd underwrite. He didn't set out to make a body-positivity message, he writes — he set out to make “a love story that is allowed to be specific.” Underneath every choice, he says, sits a question he hasn't seen many films center honestly: “what happens when the person rejecting you is yourself.” Read next to Bhatt's answer about keeping it real on camera, our take is that the two men are working the same problem from opposite sides of the lens. Nobody wants to be a lesson. Everybody wants to be shot well.