Seven-and-a-half years ago, Michael Ausiello said goodbye to his husband, Kit Cowan, who died of cancer. He has been saying goodbye to him—grieving him, remembering him, celebrating him—almost constantly since.
He said goodbye to him in his book, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, about meeting and falling in love with Kit and caring for him at the end of his life, which he wrote while still in the grieving process.
He said goodbye again on the book’s press tour, speaking to writers like me, to his friends, and to celebrities who are mentioned in it, like Kristen Bell and Keri Russell. Ausiello is an entertainment journalist, who wrote for TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly before founding the website TVLine.com. He got the phone call that Kit might have cancer while on the set of The Americans waiting to interview Russell. After a doctor gave Kit his prognosis, Ausiello had to film an on-camera conversation with Bell.
He said goodbye on a movie set, while watching Emmy-winner Jim Parsons play himself, and the platonic ideal of a perfect and talented man, Ben Aldridge, play Kit in the new movie Spoiler Alert, which expands to wide release this weekend. He watched as Parsons, acting as him, held Kit’s hand as he passed away in a tear-jerking hospital death scene. Now, doing more press in support of the movie, he's having to talk about it all—and say goodbye—again.
But that’s the thing that both Ausiello’s book and this gorgeously faithful film adaptation makes so beautifully, emotionally clear: When you’ve had a love like Michael and Kit had, you don’t ever stop saying goodbye. Because the person never actually leaves you
When I first spoke about this project with Ausiello, it was in 2017, when Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies was first released. At that point, Kit had been gone for two-and-a-half years, and Ausiello had spent a majority of that time living in the sadness of that loss while writing the book. I asked him, after devoting so much energy to Kit’s care and then to writing his story, if he’s had a chance to think of how he himself is doing. Both of us began crying as he answered.
“It’s been two-and-a half years and I’m still not over him,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll have the answer to that question until I really accept that he’s gone and move on.” As his voice caught, he continued: “I’m not there yet. I think part of that is because the book hasn’t allowed me to let go. Part of it is I don’t want to let go. The book is helping me by giving me what I want. He’s still here in a way. I’m still talking about him. He’s still in my life.”
It’s been five more years since then, and Ausiello has devoted much of that time to producing the film version of Spoiler Alert—which is to say, again telling Kit’s story. I ask him if his relationship to that grief and to Kit’s memory has changed at all.
“I think grief is such a weird thing,” he says. “It's such a moving target. It still changes from week to week. I feel like I can say I feel like I'm at a place in my grieving process where I can watch the film and not feel pain. I mostly feel joy and gratitude for having that experience and meeting Kit.”
“It was hard for me to go back and even read the book, because it was hard reading some of those painful, painful parts,” he continues. “I think, initially, my memory was filled mostly with that final year and the suffering. Now as I move on, I'm thinking about the happy times.”
That happiness is the thing, though. There is so much joy in Spoiler Alert.
It is the greatest love story you will see on screen this year. That’s not because it hits the clichés of grand romantic gestures. (There are those, but less the “boombox outside your window” type and more the “invite your in-laws to the beach vacation before your husband dies” type.) It’s because it is so affirming. Yes, Spoiler Alert is also the saddest love story you will see. But it is so beautiful. It reminds you of why we fall in love.
We do it for the fun of the first part of romance: the getting over insecurities, like maybe you have an outrageous collection of Smurfs memorabilia (Ausiello did) or maybe you were still closeted (like Cowan was). But real love is moving past that—and past annoyances, like smoking too much weed, drinking too much, emotional infidelity, distance, work distractions, or diminishing passion. Those are all the things that are incredibly human, that all don’t matter when it matters: being alongside the person who you love the most as they face their death.
I can barely get through typing that without crying. Spoiler Alert is really leaning into the Kleenex of it all with its marketing, and rightfully so. At a press screening for the film, publicists handed out branded tissues; a girl sitting to my right was sobbing so loudly, at first I thought she was screaming. But the thing is: Spoiler Alert is also a very funny film. (Surprise!)
“I think the crying and the tissues get a lot of attention,” Ausiello says. “But as with the book, so much of it is told through a comic lens, because that was my relationship with Kit in a nutshell. I think what got us through emotionally the year that he was sick was comedy and gallows humor.”
That isn’t to say that he’s not taking a certain delight in hearing all of the stories about how much people weep while watching the film. “It seems weird to say that I love suffering,” he says, laughing. “It means to me that people are connecting with the movie and being moved by it. When I hear that people are crying or they have that kind of reaction to the movie, it seems like the best kind of compliment to the film.”
When I Zoom with Parsons and Aldridge to talk about the movie, they share that sentiment. “Any of us who were approached with the material wanted to do it because we were hit in the same hard way,” Parsons says.
In addition to starring in Spoiler Alert, Parsons produced the film with his husband, Todd Spiewak. Ausiello, who had interviewed Parsons many times over the years that he starred on The Big Bang Theory, asked the actor to moderate a Q&A in Los Angeles when Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies was released. As Parsons read the book to prepare for the conversation, Spiewak would discover him in the living room sobbing in a puddle of tears. It was Spiewak’s idea, after observing his husband’s visceral reaction, to option the book for a film—though Parsons wasn’t totally on board at first.
“One time I sat next to Frances McDormand at a dinner for a Golden Globes thing—that’s the only time we’ve been together for anything or spoken,” he says. “But we were there for a long time. One of the topics that came up was adapting material. She said that she felt like things that don’t necessarily succeed in their original genre are the best things to take and try again, if the story itself is good, in another genre. The reason I didn’t know about adapting the book was because it really powerfully succeeded in its original form, in my opinion.”
He laughs. “I don’t know why I bothered to tell you all that, but anyway... I just wanted to name-drop Frances McDormand.”
Ultimately, of course, he decided to make the film. Like Ausiello’s book, Spoiler Alert charts the entirety of Michael and Kit’s relationship—and, like the book, the fact that Kit dies is established immediately. They first met at Webster Hall in New York City’s East Village one night in 2001, not long after 9/11 happened and the city was still an eerie, uncertain place. They fell fast and hard for each other.
Kit was able to overlook Michael’s obsession with Smurfs, and the fact that his apartment was a de facto shrine to the characters. (Ausiello’s actual Smurfs collection is used in the film. “There’s a little cinematic embellishment,” he says. He never had a Smurfs comforter on his bed, for example, which would have been a dealbreaker for Kit—and Michael would have understood. “I would say they embellished by maybe 20 percent.”) Michael helped Kit to come out to his parents, which is one of the funniest, most charming scenes in the movie.
Throughout the years, they battled demons, separately and together. Michael worked too much, and drank a lot. Kit had an affair. They saw a couple’s therapist together. At one point, they separated and lived in different apartments. But none of that mattered when Kit received his diagnosis. Michael was going to be there. It wasn’t even a question.
“The film shows the relationship in its entirety: them falling in love and the joyful element of that, how they disarm each other, their playfulness,” Aldridge says. “It felt very real to me that it spanned a long period of time, and it shows what life and time does to your relationship. It shows what happens when you might be attracted to someone outside of the relationship, and those complications and complexities. It shows how you have to nurture something. Sometimes that’s difficult. It just felt, for me, a fully realized relationship—because it’s based on exactly that.”
There’s a sense when talking to Aldridge and Parsons, who are both gay, that filming Spoiler Alert was less a job than it was a calling. “I just loved their love and what it teaches us about love,” Aldridge says. “You can’t love without risk of pain. They go hand in hand. There’s something really hopeful about the film. When I watched it, I felt like I didn’t just watch someone pass away. I got invigorated, and was taught to cherish life and taught to love better, I think.”
Parsons remembers that, after he read Spoiler Alert, he went on Ausiello’s Instagram and scrolled through past photos. He found a photo of the two of them at the Emmy Awards, and it dawned on him that, at the moment they took the picture, Ausiello was in the thick of it, caring for Kit. “It was a little bit chilling to me to look back at that and think, ‘Oh God…’ Talk about giving a real-life lesson of you never know what somebody else is going through when you’re talking to them or dealing with them.”
There’s always a temptation, especially when a film centers on LGBT characters, to distill a lesson or a takeaway. Aldridge, Parsons, and Ausiello all have different opinions on what that might be. But the conversation reliably centers around the scene in which Michael delivers Kit’s eulogy, which hews close to the words Ausiello said and published in full in his book: “It sounds corny, I know, but [Kit] spent the last year living like he was dying, and I feel so privileged to have had a ringside seat for what turned out to be his farewell tour.”
That word, “privilege,’ resonates powerfully. It shatters your heart. For Ausiello, caring for Kit wasn’t a burden, or some sort of duty. Being able to do that for Kit was an honor. It was his greatest act of love.
“The privilege and the gift of that tragedy, literally staring life and death in the face for two people, is that rare moment that two souls get to travel together, as closely as just two souls, through something like that,” Parsons says. “So much static falls away. Necessity. Clarity. With the book and the movie, you understand that the beauty of traveling that really difficult road is that it’s a very, very rare gift of an opportunity to be in a bubble, a sacred space with them.”
The movie—and Ausiello and Cowan’s story—is a poignant reminder of how lucky any of us are to have found love in our lives at all, and a what a privilege it is, to use that word again, to be able to care for the person you love when they need you the most, difficult as it may be.
“I remember feeling that gratitude even in extreme pain after Kit died,” Ausiello says. “Just feeling so grateful to have been at Webster Hall that night, two months after 9/11 and walking out on the dance floor and seeing him. I’m getting chills just thinking about it. Even knowing now the pain and the trauma and the loss that was to come, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. How lucky was I to be there that night and to meet him?”
