As closeted Russian pop prince Alexander Lemtov, actor Dan Stevens shows up in the Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga bejeweled in rhinestones, with a moppy head of Wham!-era George Michael hair. He gives double-cheek kisses. He gives invites to his "very crazy sexy" parties. Alexander’s extraness, and that he doesn’t see what other far-less-opulent people do, is the joke. He’s beyond out of touch with the ordinary person, like Lars (Will Ferrell) and Sigrit (Rachel McAdams), small-town Icelandic best friends who become accidental Eurovision contestants and enter into a sing-off against Lemtov.

Co-written by Ferrell, the campy musical is an outrageous love letter to the Eurovision Song Contest, an inescapable UK phenom. Alexander is certainly worlds apart from Stevens’s star-making turn in Downton Abbey and his breadth of chameleonic work, which includes the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, as the beast; the thriller The Guest; as a mutant with mind powers in the trippy FX series Legion, and, recently, in the Dave Franco-directed horror film The Rental.

As for Lemtov, this isn’t Stevens’s first time taking on a queer role. One of Stevens’s earliest roles, as Nick Guest in the The Line of Beauty, featured the actor as a gay man living in 1980s Britain during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 2006 BBC miniseries adaptation of the Alan Hollinghurst novel of the same name.

For our recent interview, Stevens lost the Lemtov wig to reflect on portraying Nick Guest, and also talked about the safe place Eurovision provides contestants from anti-LGBTQ countries and, just for good measure, his favorite Cher songs.

Dan Stevens: (Laughs.) It’s certainly up there! I don’t know if we can start ranking those, but most of those people coming out of the crowd…

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