Oliver Stark has a message for the followers — and the haters — after Buck kissed Tommy on ABC’s 9-1-1.
“Humbled and overwhelmed by the positive reaction to Buck’s storyline,” Stark, 32, wrote through Instagram Story on Saturday, April 6, two days after the one centesimal episode of 9-1-1 featured his character kissing a person for the primary time. “I’ve read so many of your messages and I couldn’t be prouder.”
Whereas many followers have been hoping to see Buck discover his sexuality for years, the actor acknowledged that not everybody was pleased with the story line.
“If you are one of the smaller group of people commenting on my posts about how this has ruined the show, I would like you to know that I truly don’t care,” he wrote. “This is a show about love and inclusion. It’s featured queer relationships from he very beginning including a beautiful Black lesbian marriage played out by two of the best actresses I’ve ever watched.”
Paramedic Henrietta “Hen” Wilson (Aisha Hinds) and spouse Karen Wilson (Tracie Thoms) share son Denny and have been core characters because the 2018 pilot, and they’re solely two of a number of LGBTQ+ characters with important story traces on 9-1-1.
Stark concluded, “If one other character finding a new facet to his sexuality and realizing his bisexuality is your deal breaker — I fear you’ve missed the entire point of the show. You are not required to announce your departure.”
Evan “Buck” Buckley (Stark) and firefighter Tommy Kinard (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) kissed on the one centesimal episode, which aired Thursday, April 4. Followers of Buck and Eddie Diaz’s (Ryan Guzman) friendship have lengthy hoped that Buck would discover his sexuality, and Stark revealed that he stepped again from social media as a result of it was laborious to not publicly agree with the shippers.
“I withdrew myself a lot from social media because you would see these things [about Buck] and I would agree … but I couldn’t agree, right?” he instructed TVLine on Thursday. “It was such a fine line, because if things didn’t happen, then I’d have been quote-unquote queerbaiting. So thank you [to those fans] for sticking with the story, and I hope there’s an element of it that feels right. I also hope you continue to stay on board and enjoy the story as we tell it.”
Earlier this week, Stark completely instructed Us Weekly that the story line surrounding Buck’s sexual identification will proceed all through season 7, and his wrestle is one that’s universally relatable: you don’t know what’s “missing until you have light shined on it.”
“And I think that’s kind of the story that we’re able to start to tell here, is that Buck isn’t consciously aware of the thing that he’s looking for or what’s lacking in his life,” Stark shared with Us. “And as he hopefully starts to discover that it’s this cathartic, liberating feeling of just being able to ease into it and breathe out this big sigh of relief at last.”
9-1-1 season 7 airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.