How Viral Video Star Benito Skinner Made the Sitcom of the Summer
It’s a gloomy weekday afternoon in Manhattan but inside Boxers, a neon-lit watering hole that bills itself as “America’s gay sports bar,” it might as well be last call.
The reggaeton’s blaring, the pool table’s buzzing, and our bartender, Javier? Stripped down to his boxers, welcoming the clientele with bedroom eyes, a half-fade, and abs you could grate a wedge of pecorino on. “Where’s your husband?” Javier asks a regular, a beefy unc in a plaid shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. “Don’t you want alone time with me?” the customer parries coyly. There’s a Mets vs. Marlins game on TV, but no one is watching.
It’s into this cabaret of masculinity that the comedian Benito Skinner makes his perfectly timed entrance, just as the opening strains of Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight” play over the speakers.
“Hey, baby,” he greets me, with an exuberant quiff straight out of a YM magazine spread and a goofy-handsome boy-band mug Lou Pearlman would scam for.
Skinner, who’s wearing a Celine shirt, JW Anderson jeans, and Noah loafers, is riding high from recording an episode of The Drew Barrymore Show. But it wasn’t exactly his first appearance on the program. In 2021, as his sweet-but-bristly celebrity impressions made him a social media star, Skinner appeared on the show dressed as Barrymore from Ever After and a year later, he returned in full TV Host Drew cosplay for a segment where the real Drew interviewed the fake Drew about his impressions. “You are pioneering something and this will get traced back to you,” Barrymore told him, presciently.
Today, Skinner was on the show as himself, Instagram’s favorite impressionist finally invited to the party.
It’s a heady time for the 31-year-old. Next week, Overcompensating, the half-hour comedy series he created, wrote, and stars in, will premiere on Prime Video with cosigns from industry giants like A24, Jonah Hill, and Charli XCX. The show has been a lifetime in the making, a hilarious piece of autofiction that also functions as a big career leap forward.
