Wentworth Miller has never been married. There is no wife, no husband, and no partner he has ever named in public. He came out as gay in August 2013, and he has given almost no interviews since, which leaves a gap that guesswork tends to fill.
The confusion has a specific source. Miller’s best known character married on screen, in front of a very large audience, during the same years the actor playing him was telling reporters he was straight.
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The marriage that aired on Fox
Prison Break ran on Fox from 2005 to 2009 and earned Miller a Golden Globe nomination for its first season. He played Michael Scofield, a structural engineer who has an escape plan tattooed across his body so he can break his brother out of death row. Over four seasons, Scofield’s relationship with prison doctor Sara Tancredi, played by Sarah Wayne Callies, became the show’s emotional centre. The two marry in Prison Break: The Final Break, a film released in 2009, and they have a son named after his father.
In 2007, with the series at its peak, Miller told InStyle he was not gay. He had been out to family and close friends for years by that point. He came back to the subject with Details magazine in 2014, the year after his public statement: “I thought it was my job to act a certain way.” His face was on billboards, and keeping the story consistent was, as he understood it, part of the work.
One Saturday in 2007
The name attached to Miller more often than any other belongs to the Canadian actor Luke Macfarlane, and the whole thing rests on a single afternoon.
On 27 August 2007, Just Jared published photographs of the two men out together in Los Angeles. They stopped at a Kinko’s, where Miller used a computer, picked up drinks at Starbucks, visited a small gallery in Culver City, and finished the day at an In-N-Out drive-through. The site described Macfarlane as an “actor pal.” Nobody in that piece claimed the two were a couple.
Nineteen years on, those photographs still circulate as proof of a secret romance. Neither man has confirmed anything. Macfarlane came out publicly in 2008 and now has a partner, Hig Roberts, and a daughter.
The letter
Miller answered the question himself in August 2013, by turning down an invitation.
The St Petersburg International Film Festival asked him to attend as a guest of honour. He wrote back to its director, Maria Averbakh, thanked her, noted that he had enjoyed visiting Russia and could claim some Russian ancestry, and then said no. “As a gay man, I must decline,” he wrote. He went on to say he could not take part in a celebration hosted by a country where people like him were being denied the right to live and love openly, a reference to laws Russia had passed that June. GLAAD posted the letter in full on its website the same day.
He signed it as a member of the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and the ManKind Project, a men’s peer support group he had joined the year before. He was 41.
What he says now
Miller has not sat for an interview in years. He does write, though, at length and under his own name.
His Instagram account holds 48 posts and 1.7 million followers, and he follows nobody back. Most of what he puts there are essays rather than photographs, several hundred words at a time, about his father, about fear, about the men he has worked for and lived alongside, about a therapist he stopped seeing after one bad hour.
A post from this May describes breakfast with his mother. He was telling her about a new boyfriend, that they were in love, and she said, “Stop smiling.” He looked at her. She looked back, then tried to pass it off as a joke.
He has never named the boyfriend or said when the conversation happened. In another post, from July, he writes about how hard he worked as a child to earn his father’s affection, how he repeated that pattern in relationships later on, and how he eventually stopped chasing love that was not available to him. None of it came from an interview.
He has no children. There is no husband either.
His acting has mostly stopped alongside the press. In 2020 he announced on Instagram that he was done with the franchise that made him, writing “I’m out. Of PB. Officially,” and explaining that as a gay man he no longer wanted to play straight characters. Hulu released the first teaser this week for Prison Break: Black Creek, a new series set in the same world with an entirely new cast. Michael Scofield is not in it.
Miller, born in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, to American parents, turned 54 in June. His last post went up on 4 July.
