Spoiler Alert ahead for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season three, episode six: It’s Comedy Or Cabbage.

Handsome, sexy Luke Kirby, who won an Emmy Award for playing comic legend Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, has plenty of impressive acting credits on stage, screen and television. He is Canadian-American, and he had much of his career in Canada with stage roles and a recurring role on Slings & Arrows, a charming Canadian television series about the theatre world set at a Shakespearean festival.

Kirby has worked in American television also, including reoccurring roles on Rectify, The Good Wife, The Deuce, The Good Fight and Tales Of The City.

I first spotted him in a small, sweet-natured gay-themed film Mambo Italiano (2003). Kirby plays a young aspiring Canadian writer, Angelo, who decides to move in with his cop boyfriend, Nino (Peter Miller), whom he’s known since they were kids. He’s faced with the challenge of how to pull off the move, without his Italian immigrant parents discovering the truth about his gayness while they’re trying to set him up with a nice Italian-Canadian girl.

The gay relationships are treated with a certain comic freshness. Angelo’s parents, played by the great Paul Sorvino and Ginette Reno, struggle to come to terms with the news while his police officer boyfriend tries to hide his queerness fearing society’s reaction.

Kirby, who is straight but not narrow, said in 2003:

“Most people, whether they care to admit it or not, have had the experience with someone who they care about coming out of the closet. I think that that’s a fair reason why anyone would go to see it at all. This is a movie that isn’t specific to a gay audience and wasn’t built to make the divide stronger. If there was any sort of sociological intention, which I doubt they would like me to talk about, it’s a film about acceptance. Angelo’s not happy in his Italian neighborhood, but he’s not going to be happy in the village, either. He’s a guy who doesn’t like the sense that you have to pick one box to live in versus another, so I think that the movie is about acceptance, which is the beautiful thing about it.”

I have been swooning over Kirby’s Lenny Bruce since season one of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It’s Comedy Or Cabbage finally establishes Lenny Bruce and Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) as a prospective romance. Lenny takes Midge to the taping of Miami After Dark, a Miami local late-night show, a sort of spin on Playboy After Dark (a television show hosted by Hugh Hefner from 1969 to 1970). When the show is filming, Lenny uses his influence to get Midge onto the soundstage with him. They fall into a zany bit about being a brother/sister married duo, which serves as foreplay for someone as comedy obsessed as Midge.

Next, Midge and Bruce go to a smoky afterhours club. It is a genuinely sexy scene, as the camera languidly circles them while sitting opposite each other. The pair can’t take their eyes off each other. Midge says: ”You’re staring” to Bruce, who has never looked hotter than this moment under the club’s moody pink lights. ”So are you”, he responds. Then they begin dancing around the club in a beautiful tracking shot that ends with Midge’s head resting on Bruce’s chest. It’s a scene overflowing with sexual tension.

They end up at Bruce’s hotel room. He suggests that something sexual might finally happen between them, but Midge says no and gets a cab. As she leaves, He calls out: ”Maybe someday? Before I’m dead?”

Midge walks away, tossing off: ”It’s a date!”

The whole thing was so hot, I thought I might faint.

The current season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is set in 1960, and it is important to note that Lenny Bruce’s substance abuse began in 1964. That means the series is four years away from Bruce’s darkest period.

After a week of previews, on Wednesday night, Kirby will appear in the world premiere of Judgment Day, Christopher Shinn‘s new adaptation of Odon von Horvarth‘s noir-ish thriller from 1937, a cautionary tale on the rise of fascism and its dangers, written on the eve of World War II.  The play is directed by eight-time Olivier Award-winning director Richard Jones, and the cast includes Broadway veterans Henry Stram and the fabulous Harriet Harris. It is being staged at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory. Judgment Day runs through January 2020.