From Toronto to Tehran: How Eric McCormack Became the Planet’s Favourite Non-Threatening Export

Eric McCormack, International Man of Mild Intrigue
By “Señorita Crónica,” roving correspondent, somewhere between a jet-lagged departure lounge and the existential void

We open on a Tuesday in Luxembourg, where a minor diplomat—second-tier, the kind who gets invited to embassy cocktail parties only when the ambassador’s cat is sick—leans over his Negroni and whispers, “You know, Will Truman normalized the American sitcom homosexual from Ulan Bator to Montevideo.” One must admire the reach: a Canadian actor, playing a gay New York lawyer, beamed by Netflix algorithms into 190-odd jurisdictions, soothing authoritarian uncles who previously believed “gay” was a CIA plot. That, dear Locker readers, is soft power in a cashmere sweater.

Eric McCormack’s passport might list “actor” under occupation, but the fine print should read “accidental cultural attaché.” Born in Toronto, trained in London (the one with drizzle and subsidised theatre), he has spent three decades exporting a particular brand of North-American affability—equal parts self-deprecation and orthodontics—to the four corners of a globe that can’t quite decide whether to love or resent the United States. The irony? His most famous character doesn’t even have a passport episode; Will’s biggest travel trauma is a lost luggage subplot in season six. Still, the luggage is Louis Vuitton, so the UN counts it as international commerce.

From Seoul to São Paulo, McCormack’s face is shorthand for “harmless cosmopolitan elite,” a demographic increasingly rare now that populists have rebranded “cosmopolitan” as a slur right up there with “tax auditor.” In Poland, state television once ran a 3 a.m. dub of Will & Grace to fill a hole left by budget cuts; overnight, Google searches for “American kitchen island” spiked 400 percent. Coincidence? Ask the Polish cabinet, which quietly installed an island in the prime minister’s summer residence the following year. Soft power, hard granite.

Of course, nothing this pleasant arrives without collateral damage. In Egypt, a streaming service executive confessed—over extremely sweet tea—that conservative censors demanded Will and Grace be renamed “Will and His Female Roommate Who Knits.” McCormack’s nuanced performance thus became subversive samizdat, traded on USB sticks between graduate students who already knew the score but appreciated the laugh track. To them, McCormack isn’t merely an actor; he’s proof that somewhere, a studio audience still applauds the audacity of being yourself on a Thursday night.

Meanwhile, the man himself has leveraged global curiosity into a second act as a touring musician—crooning jazz standards in Manila hotel ballrooms where the champagne is real but the politics are flat. A recent stop in Dubai required a last-minute lyric change; the words “bourbon” and “sin” were replaced with “tea” and “spin class,” respectively. McCormack later joked on Instagram that he felt like a UN interpreter for emotions. The post earned 120k likes and one death threat from a guy in Akron who insists jazz is communism. The internet remains undefeated.

Back home in Hollywood, agents whisper that McCormack’s next project is a thriller set in a dystopian Geneva where the World Trade Organization has gone feral. One envisions him negotiating tariff disputes with nothing but impeccable diction and a well-timed eye roll. If the film ever releases, expect conspiracy theorists from Ankara to Anchorage to claim it’s a documentary. That’s the McCormack Paradox: the more benign he appears, the more the planet projects its neuroses onto him.

Conclusion? Eric McCormack has become the diplomatic equivalent of oat milk—ubiquitous, vaguely virtuous, and impossible to boycott without looking petty. In a fractured world, he remains a low-stakes consensus, proof that we can still agree on something, even if it’s only the comic timing of a Canadian pretending to be a New Yorker. If civilization collapses tomorrow, future archaeologists will unearth a boxed set of Will & Grace, note the laugh track, and conclude we weren’t entirely without hope—just easily amused.