For the life of him, Drew Tarver cannot remember an extremely funny line that Lukas Gage improvised while shooting a guest spot on The Other Two. “I’m trying to think. Let me come back to it. He said something when he was getting a drink. I’ll remember soon. My brain is numb,” says Tarver during a recent Zoom. Either way, he fondly recalls working with him months before Gage would go on to break the internet with his whirlwind marriage to hairstylist Chris Appleton, officiated by Kim Kardashian. (For the record, Tarver recalled Gage's improvised line a little while after we finished our Zoom and sent it to me in an email. “One take he just went “yummy merlot!,” he wrote. “I lost it.”)

“The guest stars coming on and playing themselves who are well-known performers, it really helps give the storylines a legitimacy,” says Tarver. “‘Oh, yes: Cary is an actor, alongside Lukas Gage and Dylan O’Brien.’” 

Fame—how to gain it, what to do with it, how to live with it—has always been the central question of The Other Two, the HBO Max comedy created by former SNL writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider. The series follows Cary, played by Tarver, and his sister Brooke (Heléne Yorke) as they try to find professional success beyond the shadow of their Justin Bieber-esque brother Chase Dubek (Case Walker) and their daytime television queen mother Pat (Molly Shannon). By the third season, Cary has finally begun to make a name for himself as an actor—but at what cost? “The more he engages with fame, the more he loses sight, I think, of why he wanted to do this,” Tarver says. 

Cary’s ascent up the fame ladder helps him land a method actor ingenue boyfriend, Lucas (Fin Argus), whom he can never have sex with because Lucas is always in character. “I don’t think he’s managing them well,” says Tarver of Cary’s personal and professional lives. “I think he does want love, and he also really wants to be successful. And he’s like, Wait, are those mutually exclusive? Am I combining them? He’s combining them in a way that I don’t think is serving him well.” By episode five, “Cary & Brooke Go to an AIDS Play,” the cracks have begun to show: Cary resorts to blackmailing Gage into dropping a role as a 70s-era gay porn star so that his boyfriend can play the part instead. 

Much as Lucas will in that movie, Tarver strips down frequently in season three as Cary struggles to initiate intimacy with his boyfriend. “I’m glad that during the pandemic I did more pushups,” quips Tarver. “In previous seasons, he’s been a little in his head about love. I enjoy that he’s a little bit more in his body sexually, and that means me showing a little more thigh or a little more shoulder. If that means I got to show a hairy nipple, I got to show it.” 

While Cary Dubek is perhaps not as sexually stunted as he once was, his emotional maturity still leaves much to be desired. In “Globby,” written by Gilli Nissim, Cary books the episode’s exciting, titular role—an anthropomorphic mucus who is, according to the show’s faux Disney execs, involved in the studio’s first-ever explicitly gay scene.

“Globby was originally a fish or something,” Tarver says. “When I was doing ADR, they had redesigned Globby. Globby ended up looking more like one of those fish that gets puffy, with the spikes on them, with the weird little mouth, and it was killing me. The Globby redesign looked so much more dumb than the original Globby, and it was perfect. I could not look at Globby without laughing.”

High off the attention, Cary talks a big game about the scene to the press. But In classic The Other Two fashion, the supposed gay milestone never really comes to fruition—angering everyone from GLAAD to the Westboro Baptist Church. The scene Cary has been promoting winds up being tiny, a moment that briefly pictures Globby in bed with another glob. Why is it such a big deal? “If he were straight, Globby would be in bed with a human woman,” one Disney exec explains. 

As Tarver points out, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. “I think [Cary’s] heart is in a good place at the beginning of that episode. Clearly, he’s excited about being the face of anything that would potentially get him a lot of press—but I think, deep down, there’s something about Cary that, even when he’s being his worst, he knows.”

There’s a compelling argument to be made that Cary (and his sister Brooke) really are the worst in season three, alienating their closest allies—in Cary’s case, his actor BFF Curtis (Brandon Scott Jones), and in Brooke’s, her himbo nurse boyfriend Lance (Josh Segarra). But Brooke and Cary are never entirely unlikeable, whether they’re gaslighting their boyfriends or wearing a Billy Porter-esque gown emblazoned with names of queer icons they know nothing about. “I think that’s what the writers do so well, is walking these characters out into the woods and having the audience come with them,” Tarver says. “This season is more surreal, and the swings are bigger. Going full villain in the third season has been a very fun thing to play, and try to pull it off and be like, Can I bring an audience along with this character, this far into Walter White-esque [territory]?”

He pauses and laughs. “Cary will start making meth in his RV soon, and you’ll probably be like, That’s actually the best thing Cary’s done. That’s actually not villainous at all, compared to the other stuff.”