In Bad Neighbours (known simply as Neighbors in the US), there were jokes that suggested Dave Franco’s character, Pete, was gay but pretending he wasn’t, as well as playing up the homerotic undertones between him and Zac Efron’s character. Well, with the sequel, they’ve decided to stop being coy about it, as Pete is coming out.

Director Nicholas Stoller talked to Yahoo! about why they decided to be more open about it, which apparently happened after a journalist asked him why he’d never included a gay character in any of his films (such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, and The Five-Year Engagement). It set Stoller thinking, “I was like, ‘I don’t know why. I literally don’t know. I have no good answer for that.’ So this seemed like an organic way to have that happen.”

With the relationship between Pete and Efron’s fellow frat brother, Teddy, he says, “Clearly, we’re playing with the homoerotic tension there, and I was like, ‘He should just be gay.’ Then in this one, it came up again. [Co-writer] Evan Goldberg brought it up, and he said, ‘I think he should be gay, and part of [his arc] should be the proposal.’ It was kind of all of us coming to the same conclusion.”

However, Teddy won’t be following Pete down the lavender path despite the level of their bromance, with Stoller adding, “A lot of Zac’s motivations in the first movie, especially with his girlfriend and stuff, seemed pretty straight. It felt like it might seem like a stunt if we made him gay. But it seemed to just work with Dave.”