As Scorch Marks arrives on Dekkoo October 1, the Eating Out alum talks trading rom-com charm for horror-movie menace — and why playing a villain finally let him explore his darker side.

By Robert Hassilow

When Scorch Marks — his new apocalyptic survival horror film — releases October 1, Chris Salvatore hopes fans feel like they’re meeting him again for the first time. “A lot of my fans have been with me since Eating Out, which was such a fun and unapologetically queer moment in my life and career,” he says. “Some of these people first saw me as Zack when I was basically just starting my life in Los Angeles. Now, all these years later, they’re seeing a very different actor and a very different person.”

Scorch Marks follows Beckett, a man who awakens to a seemingly devastated world, only to find himself trapped with the haunting presence of his abusive ex-husband, Joel, as an even greater force approaches from beyond the horizon. It’s a long way from the sunny comedy of Eating Out, and that distance is exactly what drew Salvatore to it.

He says he’ll always have deep affection for Zack and those films, but Scorch Marks gave him a chance to go somewhere he’d never been. “Joel is dark, damaged and, at times, genuinely frightening, and I got to explore parts of myself as an actor that audiences really haven’t seen before.”

What he loves is that the two roles still connect. Eating Out was about queer people getting to be funny, sexual, messy and romantic on screen; Scorch Marks argues that queer characters also deserve to exist in the bigger, harder worlds of horror, trauma, grief and survival. Queer storytelling has grown tremendously since then, and Salvatore has grown right along with it.

“So for the people who have been watching me since the beginning, I’d love for them to finish Scorch Marks feeling surprised by what they saw from me, and maybe even a little proud of that evolution,” he says.

We caught up with Salvatore from his home in Los Angeles to talk about playing against type, drawing from his own past relationships, and why he’s finally ready for his horror-movie era.

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