Father and child reunion: best known as Rory's father on Gilmore Girls, actor David Sutcliffe explores a gay couple's longing for parenthood in "Happy Endings".

David Sutcliffe's role in Don Roos's newest ensemble comedy-drama, Happy Endings, could not be more different from his performance as a gruff, obsessive, and sexually adventurous gay graphic novelist in 2004's Testosterone. Gil, by comparison, is a milquetoast, a seemingly levelheaded gay man in a stagnant five-year relationship with Charley (Steve Coogan), a restaurant owner with whom, the film's witty narration tells us, Gil will "never have a three-way."

"Gil's a little bit in denial," Sutcliffe, 36, observes. "He's a little uptight. He's not really sure what he's feeling all the time. And he's confused and he's in a relationship that's going nowhere, but he doesn't have the guts to face it."

Sutcliffe says he got to dig deep into Gil's psyche largely due to the easygoing collaboration on the set encouraged by out writer-director Roos (The Opposite of Sex). Rather than preciously safeguarding creative control, Sutcliffe says, Roos made a habit of going with his actors' instincts, even when they contradicted his screenplay--for example, in a scene when, as written, Gil comes home a little tipsy and climbs into bed with Charley without disturbing him.

"I said [to Don], 'I think we need to be snuggled up,'" Sutcliffe recalls. "This is the one moment in the film where you need to see affection between these people and remind the audience that they actually have been lovers for five years. I thought it was really vital, and immediately [Don] was like, 'That's right, that's better.'" (Unfortunately, the scene was later cut. "But I'm sure it's not [because of the change]," Sutcliffe says with a chuckle.)

That yearning for connection, especially between parent and child, is part of what drives the three intersecting story lines of Happy Endings, which begins hitting theaters on July 15. Charley, a true neurotic who once impregnated his stepsister (Lisa Kudrow), is so latently hungry for fatherhood that he's determined to prove that Gil is the unacknowledged father of their lesbian best friends' newborn baby. It's an issue that Sutcliffe, as a straight man, says he had never quite considered.

"You're gay and you're happy and you have a lover, and then you say, 'I want to have children,'" he ruminates. "You just spent all this time working toward this sense of yourself and accepting it, and then you've got this whole other part of you, this wanting to procreate. That's got to be a huge conflict for gay men. How do they deal with that? That to me was the most fascinating aspect of the story." In building and defining one's family, he adds, "there's a lot of gray area there, and it's got to be complicated for everybody."

Sutcliffe's own parents are divorced; he has two half brothers. Even his most high-profile role, as Rory's largely absent father on the WB's Gilmore Girls, touches on issues of parental abandonment and fractured families. "I think there's a lot of people feeling very disconnected from family," he says. "I think that [family] is a grounding force that we all desire, whether that's your actual family or a family of friends. I think there are a lot of people in the world feeling completely alienated and alone and just not sure what their place is. I think that's for me what the movie's exploring, that desire for family and to create family and to create deep bonds with people."

Vary also contributes to Entertainment Weekly.

Don's plums

Top 5 highlights so far from the career of Happy Endings' out writer-director, Don Roos

5 Bounce (writer-director, 2000). If you're vulnerable enough, this high-concept Ben Affleck-Gwyneth Paltrow love story can put a dent in your tissue box.

4 Single White Female (writer, 1992). Jennifer Jason Leigh is the psycho roommate we'd most want to run from, screaming.

3 Boys on the Side (writer, 1995). Offbeat and a bit off-kilter but still the best lesbian AIDS love story we know of.

2 Love Field (writer, 1992). An underrated gem teaming Michelle Pfeiffer and Dennis Haysbert in the 1960s South.

1 The Opposite of Sex [writer-director, 1998). The hilarious and heartfelt epitome of political incorrectness. A queer classic.