BEN PLATT: SINGING, DANCING AND CAUSING A RUCKUS

Ben Platt is having a moment. With his just-released third album, Honeymind (produced by nine-time Grammy winner Dave Cobb), the platinum artist is in the middle of an 18-day residency at New York’s historic Palace Theatre, after which he’ll embark on a North American summer tour.

Benjamin Schiff Platt already has more to be proud of professionally than most people achieve in a lifetime; at only 30, he’s won a Grammy, an Emmy and a Tony. But what he’s most proud of is having won the heart of his fiancé, actor-singer Noah Galvin.

Below, Platt shares his perspective on Pride 2024—the good, the bad and the mazel tov.

How does Pride feel to you in 2024?

It feels polarized in a strange way. It feels, in some ways, as comfortable and celebratory and advanced and inclusive as it’s ever been. And it also feels a little bit scary and important and vital in terms of the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation and the rhetoric coming from a certain group of people in the country hoping to take us backward. I think it’s a weird dichotomy. Just when it’s starting to feel like it’s really, truly for us and for the community and doesn’t need to be politically charged or change minds, we’re also back in a spot where we really do need to be doing just that.

So Pride carries weight and is important. And I think it isn’t maybe as carefree as we would like it to be in 2024. But still, there’s a lot to celebrate. And there’s a lot of forward movement and a lot of reasons for it to be joyful. I feel both things this year.

Your mother grew up in Wichita, Kansas. And I’ve read that it was hard for her to find her Jewish identity there. Can you talk about what you’ve gotten from her in terms of who you are?

She’s a very emotionally open, tender-hearted person. Not to say that my dad isn’t as well. But I think she and I really share this desire to be the glue, to mediate and allay anxieties, to be the caretaker. And, doing what I do, and especially in the theater, leading a cast or a band on tour, anytime I find myself in any kind of leadership position, the only reason I have any instinct about how to do that on an emotional level is because my mom did that for our family. As you said, because she grew up in Wichita, and there wasn’t so much community for her, I think she feels grateful for all the communities that she’s part of now and particularly our family and the closeness we have. She’s always instilled in me the importance of not taking that for granted.

I read that you came out at the age of 13. Is that right?

Yes. I was in eighth grade, and I was on a school trip. There had been some sort of bullying—or what was perceived as a bullying incident that really wasn’t. I’d already told a couple of my friends that I felt I was gay. And there was a kid who was talking about how he was jealous of that fact because all the girls let me hang out with them and told me their secrets. And I think that it was perceived by our chaperone as, “Oh, he’s bullying this kid for being gay.” But he was right—that’s just what was happening.

And I think I knew that it would get back to my parents. I didn’t want that to be the context in which we discussed it. So I called them from the trip and told them, only to hear that they both kind of already knew.

Was this before or after your bar mitzvah?

Shortly after.

So you became a man and then a gay man.

That’s right, a man under the Torah and a man under the gays.

Hair was the first Broadway musical to speak to people about sexuality and political freedom. And you were cast in it at Columbia. What was it like to perform in that show?

That production was really the only experience I had of college. I was accepted early decision to Columbia after my senior year of high school. And I deferred for a year because I had been cast in Pitch Perfect, a film I’d had to take most of a year to finish shooting. So I took sort of a gap year and did some theater. The following fall I started for real at Columbia and thought I was starting a regular college career.

So I signed up for the musical and it was Hair, and it was student- run. It was very scrappy, as Hair should be—messy and emotional and a wonderful thing. But halfway through the process, I was cast in The Book of Mormon in Chicago, so I knew I’d have to leave school. But I didn’t want to desert the cast and company of this show we’d started making. So while I was rehearsing The Book of Mormon, in the evenings I’d come back to campus and rehearse Hair. And then on the final weekend, before I moved to Chicago, I think we did three performances of Hair.

It was my only little microcosm of a college experience. And I can’t think of a more beautiful show for that. It’s a bonding experience for anyone who does the show because it’s very vulnerable and very freeing, and you have to really let loose. I’m grateful that I at least got one feeling of college youth theater and that bonding before I went on my journey. I look back on it very fondly.

The theme of your new album, Honeymind, is what you call “gay Americana.” You’ve talked about some of the musical influences you had in making this record—Carole King, James Taylor and Fleetwood Mac. And you’ve said you wished you had this kind of album growing up as a queer kid.

In terms of songs I’ve written that are specific or similar to my queer experience, I’m not necessarily thinking, “Oh, I haven’t seen this enough and I want to see it” or “I’m trying to make a statement about how I’m representing this.” It really comes just from an experience from my past that was emotional enough to make me want to write a song. It was the experience of all the times I had a wonderful straight friend whom I developed feelings for and then realized I didn’t have anywhere to go with those feelings. I had to learn how to live with them and live in the melancholy of that. And I realized “Wow, that’s a song!”

The video for the first single from Honeymind, “Andrew,” is about unrequited longing.

I had to think “How do I represent what the song means to me?” So we tried to mirror that experience, to share what it felt like to be a 13- or 14-year-old boy having those feelings and how it suddenly made him feel like he was floating through the hallway. I was really trying to keep it specific to what I’ve felt. And only when things start to come to fruition and get shared do I realize how many people want or need to see something like that represented. It becomes such a beautiful experience. I’m very glad that the “Andrew” video is so evocative of what I wanted it to be.

I first realized the effect it would have when I showed it to some friends—mostly for creative ideas, expecting they would just give me notes. But what I heard back from them was so much more. It was personal: “I’ve never really seen this represented—a young boy, this age, going through something like this.” Or “Usually when you see kids in middle school on TV flirting, it’s a guy and a girl.” It was a wonderful reaction to hear. And it makes me want to continue to mine my own experiences and, like you said, maybe give queer people more examples of things that I wish I’d had when I was younger.

By complete coincidence I happened to be watching Theater Camp, which you co-produced and starred in, only two days before I knew we’d be having this conversation. Tell us about producing and starring in the film.

It was hugely challenging and hugely rewarding. I think anyone who’s had an indie filmmaking experience knows that it’s like pushing a boulder up a hill. The whole process just becomes creative problem-solving. Noah, our collaborators Nick Lieberman and Molly Gordon and I made a short [also called Theater Camp] in 2017. Just out of joy and curiosity about this world we thought we had a good take on because we’d been part of it. We just loved what we made and the response to it. We’d been fighting to make it into a feature for a long time. But to go to financiers and producers and say, “We’re making a musical theater mockumentary that’s largely improvised and stars a bunch of children and has an original musical at the end,” and we had to make it for, like, $5 million or less—I understand why it took a little while. Finally, things started to come together.

That’s kind of a metaphor for the movie itself—the movie is a metaphor for the making of the movie.

Exactly, and I think you can feel that when you watch it; just the whole elbow grease, bootstraps, putting-on-a-show-in-the-barn feeling, which is exactly what we wanted. And that’s what theater camp is—joyful.

What was it like working with your fiancé?

Noah and I went in with our antennas up in terms of working professionally and creatively together as a solidified couple for the first time and giving each other artistic criticism. I think that became the most joyful part of it.

It was so wonderful to watch Noah shine. He really created and led the parade on that character [Glenn Winthrop, the head of the camp’s tech crew, who replaces the show’s lead when she gets a film role and is finally able to demonstrate his talent as a performer] and was very passionate about the arc, his character’s transformation. He was really hellbent on challenging himself. And he saw it through. It became the highlight of the film, unanimously. He was nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award [for Best Supporting Performance]. It’s an amazing performance. There were so many things I loved about that experience, but most of all, it was just a beautiful thing to share with Noah. We are already trying to collaborate on other things. [The video for “Cherry on Top,” the second for a song from Honeymind, was directed by Platt and co-stars Platt and Galvin.]

There are a lot of parallels between queer pride and Jewish pride, and your Jewish pride was established at summer camp—you’ve said, “Camp Ramah was where I came to understand my Jewish identity.”

To be totally transparent, at the time I was there, it was not particularly set up for queer campers or nonbinary campers or trans campers. That’s not to say I felt depressed or anything, but camp can be a very binary thing in terms of the girls’ bunks and the boys’ bunks and the girls’ activities and the boys’ activities. I sometimes felt a little lost in the middle. By virtue of that, I started to explore this question: What are the elements of being a Jewish person, and an adult, that connect to me and are mine, culturally and spiritually? Feeling that difference really helped me take pride in what I wanted to carry internally in terms of my Judaism. As I got older and started to live in New York and create my own community, I was able to see many different types of synagogues, leaders and rhetoric.

I think the more you allow yourself to individualize your relationship to the Jewish blood that runs through your veins, no matter what you feel about God, the more powerful and special it can be to have some sort of relationship with your Judaism. It definitely started me on the path of wanting to explore that—paying attention to the ways in which I don’t feel it was the same for me as it was for some people in my community and being OK with that difference, and deciding how I wanted to count myself as a Jew. That is ever-evolving. I’ve just moved into a home with Noah, and we’re excited to create our own Shabbat and our little Jewish community out here. I think what’s beautiful about Judaism is that it’s all about interpretation, asking questions and finding what’s meaningful about it to you. There’s no way to be a good Jew or a bad Jew; you just are one, and you can’t help it.

It seems you’ve been able to integrate your queer identity and your Jewish identity. What can you say about how those two things come together for you? Because they’re coming together in the world right now, unfortunately, in resurgent homophobia and antisemitism. The need for alliances between people who are suffering from oppression or hostility feels like it’s never been greater.

Feeling othered in some way—being made to feel different from whatever the norm is—can unite people. The Jewish experience and the queer experience are a Venn diagram. And the parts that don’t connect are very different. But there is a lot in the middle, when it comes to something that’s in your blood, something you can’t control, something that is inherent to your identity, that no matter how you choose to rebuke it or embrace it, it’s still there. That is an irrefutable bond. That extends to racial identity, sexual identity, gender identity, anything about yourself that you have no choice but to embrace and that others are adamant that you should not. It makes total sense to me that the Jewish community and the queer community would share that experience and want to lift each other up.

The Jewish community is incredibly small [approximately 0.2% of the global population], which I think a lot of people don’t realize. It’s infinitely smaller than the other religious communities you could compare it to, infinitely smaller than the racial communities you could compare it to, and much, much smaller than the queer community. So, when you get to the crossroads of the Jewish queer experience, that’s an even tinier Venn diagram.

Yet even in that little pool, I’m starting to see more people I relate to—groups and communities and spaces. There’s this gay Shabbat event that my brother goes to here in New York every week that he loves and where he has met so many friends. It’s just beautiful to see that we’re getting to a point where at all these little intersections, people are raising their hand and wanting to be counted. And obviously, for me, the one that’s most meaningful and special to see is the crossroads of queerness and Judaism.

And that’s a statement of Pride on both counts.

That’s right.

Last question: So nu, when’s the wedding?

The wedding is on an undisclosed date at an undisclosed location. But it is coming this year in the fall. And we’re just hoping to create a really good night of dancing, because that’s how we celebrate both in terms of our Jewish identities and our gay identities. Both of those communities know how to dance and cause a fucking ruckus!