“My family has done a lot of inappropriate laughing at funerals,” shrugs Andrew Rannells. “We often find humour in the strangest, darkest of moments. And in grieving – in the heightened atmosphere of those church moments – you can do some of the best laughing.”

We’re on the subject of funerals as his new film, plays out as a long fuse burning up to one. It’s a distinctively weird and witty two-hander that yanks some of those big, shocking laughs from moments of intense, brutal loss and despair.

Originally written for the theatre by Jim Rash, it’s a film that pitches the jazz handsy, baby-faced Rannells against the caustic cleverness of Oscar-winner Allison Janney. She plays Diane, the mother of an emotionally remote, high-flying foreign correspondent called Tyler. When her second husband – Tyler’s stepfather – dies, Diane’s son is too busy working abroad to come home and support her. Instead, he dispatches his PA (Rannells’s character Jamie) to help with the sadmin in filii loco.

Jamie is a people-pleaser and does his best to absorb Diane’s furious grief and disappointment at her son’s absence, but struggles to maintain his cheery demeanor as she probes deeper into the nature of his devotion to her son. As both of them are repeatedly fobbed off by texts from Tyler reading “miss you, love you,” the tension builds to breaking point.

“I’ve never had a personal assistant myself,” says Rannells, chatting cheerfully via video from the New York home he shares with his actor partner Tuc Watkins and Watkins’s twin children. “But a lot of my actor, producer friends do and it is a really, um…” he makes a face. “It’s an odd relationship, right? You’re asking these people to do really personal things – picking up your dry cleaning while you confide in them – and the line between employee and friend can very easily get blurred.”

He shrugs. “In both characters are confused. Jamie is thinking, ‘Maybe this woman is my friend?’ And Diane sees Jamie as a proxy son who betrays her by telling her actual son what is happening in her house.”

It turns out there’s a lot going on for Jamie, who is coping with bereavement of his own, and Rannells brings real bite and poignancy to the part. Although he says he’s “proud to have built a career out of playing ‘the sassy, gay friend’”, he admits it’s good to find more nuance and unpredictability in a part.

He explains that: “Jim Rash – who’s also gay – wrote this character with with so many flaws and complexities. Unfortunately, it’s not something that I get to play very often.” He corrects himself. “On stage, I do, but not on film.”

Rannells’s most famous character is arguably Elijah Krantz in Lena Dunham’s 2012-2017 US sitcom . Over six seasons, Elijah evolved from heroine Hannah’s ex-boyfriend, who unsettled her by coming out as gay, to become a close (sometimes toxic) friend and one of the show’s most-beloved characters.

“I always told myself that Elijah was the star of that show,” he says. “I think all of the rest of the girls – not the actors, their characters – all thought they were the star too. That’s what made it work, that no one was in service to Hannah.” He smiles. “The fact that Lena allowed us to do that made it a more interesting sort of depiction of those relationships.”

Born in 1978 in Omaha, Nebraska, Rannells is the fourth of five kids raised in a Catholic household. His dad was an advertising salesman and his mum ran the home. “It was a pretty bleak time to be looking for gay role models on TV,” he says. “You were either the class clown or you were dying of HIV and AIDS.” He exhales and rakes a hand through his hair. “I mean, those were important stories to tell, but as a gay kid it was pretty intimidating viewing. It was like, ‘Oh my! Is that what’s going to happen to me? Is that how it ends?’”

Rannells says it was his dad who got him into watching Doris Day musicals on TV, and he had his first part in a little local community theatre production of at 11. “There was no drama class at my all-boys Catholic school so that was my first taste of performance. His eyes roll back in his head in faux delight: “My class came to see me!” At 13 he was making TV and radio commercials. He goes full Broadway and sings the first jingle he wrote – for a roller rink – for me today. “School is cool, but when I get free, Skateland is where I want to beeeee!”

Other aspects of his teen years were more traumatic. In his memoir, Rannells revealed that while he was struggling with his sexuality, he decided to “confess” to Father Dominic, one of the sexagenarian priest teaching at his school. “He seemed so strong, but so kind, and I was hopeful that he could save me from myself,” Rannells wrote. “I felt safe and heard and understood. Then, with unexpected force, he kissed me. On the lips. He muscled his tongue into my mouth and held the back of my head still. Then he released me and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. He smiled.”

The teenager “walked away stunned” and managed to avoid the priest until his mother suggested they invite him to a graduation party at their home. As the priest left, he assaulted Rannells for a second time.

“We stood at my parents’ front door and said our goodbyes for the final time, and then he grabbed me by the back of the neck and forced his tongue in my mouth. I just stood there and let him. I didn’t kiss back, but I also didn’t move. He smiled at me and walked to his car. I went into our kitchen and slammed a glass of wine before going back out to the party.” Rannells left the church and soon left the state. “If you’re a young gay kid in Nebraska, you only have one option,” he tells me. “Leave.”

New York was the dream and after coming out at 18 (“Nobody was surprised,” he says) Rannells hightailed it to Marymount Manhattan College to study theatre. But tragedy struck just has he was getting into the swing of his New York adventure. In a 2019 essay for T’ Modern Love series (which he later directed as a film for Amazon Prime), he described the night his dad collapsed while he was on his second date with a guy called Brad.

Rannell was just 22 and this was one of his “first forays into courtship”. He ignored calls from his family throughout dinner, at a gay bar and on the taxi ride back to his apartment where the pair headed straight for his bedroom for an encounter that “lasted longer than it needed to”, before finally picking up his phone in the bathroom. His dad had collapsed at his sister’s family home during her daughter’s birthday party.

Today, he tells me that it took him “a good six to nine months until it hit me, all of a sudden, that my dad had died”. Looking back, he suspects that an early experience of bereavement can “open you up in a different way, you know? People would complain about other things going on in their life and you’re like like, ‘Well, my dad just died!’”

Rannells battled through a stack of rejections and a long, difficult relationship with an older man before his career on Broadway finally took off in his late twenties. “I didn’t believe it would last until I was on to my third role,” he chuckles. Although he enjoys film, TV and writing, theatre is still his first love.

He knows he’s lucky to have hit New York just as “a great wave of original musical theatre” was giving theatreland a reboot with shows like The Book of Mormon (in which he originated the role of zealous missionary Elder Kevin Price) and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s , in which he took over briefly in the role of King George III.

There, he was startled to find that Miranda’s dressing room had sound simultaneously piped in live from both the stage and that of in the neighbouring theatre: “There was so much going on at once, I understood how he can write those interlocking melodies. And then he would pop in and ask if I wanted to hear something he’d just written for . I wish I had his brain.”

He worries, though, about the soaring price of tickets both on Broadway and in the West End. “It’s so expensive to get those big theatres, to get shows up and running and to get people to take notice… I fear the business model has priced out smaller shows.”

Although he and his partner of seven years (whom he met when they played on-stage lovers in The Boys in The Band, later reprising the roles for a Netflix film) are no longer short of cash, he blanches at the memory of how much he’s paid for theatre tickets recently. How much? “An insane amount. Horrifying. I cannot tell you.”

‘Miss You, Love You’ is streaming on HBO Max