Ben Platt on His Next Act: A Star Turn in Ryan Murphy's The Politician
FEW ACTORS, even those with a surfeit of endowments—talent, timing, luck, looks—find their way to a role that might fairly be called life-changing. For those whose lives are changed by a such a role, the next question is how to avoid being defined by it. Ben Platt didn’t stumble tenderfooted into the title character of Dear Evan Hansen, the musical in which his superheated, sung-through-sobs performance earned him a Tony, an Emmy, and a Grammy before his 25th birthday. He’d been working professionally since age eight, and singing on Broadway was the unwavering dream of his boyhood. But Platt has spent two years quietly wriggling out of the net of Evan Hansen, and he wouldn’t mind at all if he never had to say another word about the anguished and lonely teenager who, he has frequently avowed, is not so entirely different from his adolescent self.
“That character was such an identifying experience,” Platt says, “and because the part dealt with anxiety, I become sort of a spokesperson. People really fell in love with that character, but it’s the one role I’ve ever felt as an actor I had to consciously turn away from—to make it clear that I am my own person, and I’m not very specifically this strange, anxious kid.” He smiles, doubting himself. “Not that I’m not strange and anxious in real life, but at this point I wouldn’t go chasing characters who have the same issues that I do.”
Though it’s the middle of the afternoon, and the purple blooms of the jacarandas blanketing the north-south streets suggest that we are in the heart of West Hollywood, Platt, who grew up 15 minutes away, is a bit lost. He has lived in Manhattan since he was 18 (though he’s still not sure he’s allowed to call himself a New Yorker), and while he knows that several of his actor friends live east of here, in Los Feliz, and that his parents’ beach house, in Malibu, lies to the west, he maintains a charming naïveté about his hometown.
“When I come back to L.A. I feel like a total alien,” he says from a perch on the tiny upstairs patio at the San Vicente Bungalows, as power lunches begin to disperse below. A few days earlier, Platt, who will turn 26 this month, wore heavy stubble and a black leather jacket to sing on Jimmy Kimmel, but today his smooth cheeks and dungaree overalls are a tether to childhood. “I know where my orthodontist’s office is and how to get to the musical-theater after-school program I went to in the Palisades, but I don’t know where it’s cool to eat or go out or to be a quote-unquote adult. I went to see Booksmart this weekend for the third time because my best friend, Beanie Feldstein, and my other best friend, Molly Gordon, and another best friend of mine, Noah Galvin, are all in the film. We did the Grove”—the inevitable outdoor mall with squirting fountains and slow armies of glazed-looking shoppers. “Does that count as a spot?” (I’m afraid it doesn’t.)
Though he flew here to close his sold-out concert tour at the Dolby Theatre, in support of Sing to Me Instead, the album of pop songs he cowrote and released this March, Platt stayed on for his second-oldest sister’s engagement party, then a backyard 40th-anniversary dinner for his parents that held the promise of ample playtime with the four nephews he adores. The Platts—Ben’s father, Marc, a film, television, and theater producer whose credits include La La Land; his mother, Julie; and his four siblings—are an intensely close family: “very warm, very Jewish,” Ben explains. While he rents an apartment in Westwood to prevent total reabsorption, it’s a short enough walk to use his parents’ gym and raid their fridge.
But this month, the child of Hollywood makes another sort of homecoming with his first onscreen starring role, in the Netflix series The Politician, Ryan Murphy’s dark satire of ambition and entitlement among the palms and pools of Santa Barbara. It’s a delicious departure, and that was the point. “Ryan came backstage after Evan Hansen,” Platt recalls of the first time he met Murphy. “He was very effusive, he was wearing this beautiful fur, and he said, ‘You’re fabulous. We’ve got to work together.’ He left, and I didn’t think much of it.” But several weeks later, Murphy texted Platt to say that he had a part in mind for him. “I was like, That’s very exciting, and maybe I’ll be on American Horror Story season nine or something.”
Instead, Murphy offered him the role of Payton Hobart, a high school senior willing to do just about anything to become student-body president, which he hopes will set him on the path to becoming president of the United States. (If the show hits, each season will follow Payton in a new political campaign.) The Politician paints a winking tableau of privilege, as if the sociopathy of Heathers or Cruel Intentions and the kooky anachronisms of Wes Anderson were shaken through the sieve of contemporary political correctness. The show’s teenagers (and their parents) are sexually fluid, self-servingly woke, and cravenly opportunistic. These are kids who speak fluent Mandarin because Dad worked for Goldman in Shanghai, and who ring for a servant to move on to the fish course. “This character is not that nice,” Platt says. “Playing sweet, well-meaning characters comes naturally to me, and I’d been wanting something else. That was Ryan’s pitch.”
Much of The Politician’s humor comes from fault lines underneath every perfectly art-directed surface. “The characters are very aware that their problems are 10th-tier problems,” Platt says. “But then the show has these moments of unexpected weight and emotional satisfaction. I actually think audiences will care about these people.”
Murphy envisioned Hobart as an antihero in the mold of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. Platt, Murphy says, “liked going there and being that guy, and he got to wear all these sexy Prada clothes that were made for him. To me he is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, sort of like the male Barbra Streisand—an actor, a singer, a dancer, a complete performer. I think he’s a new version of what a leading man can be.”
Platt was raised on a steady diet of Gypsy and Anything Goes and staged one-man versions of Cats and Thoroughly Modern Millie in the backyard. The family liked to rewrite the lyrics to songs and perform them for bar mitzvah boys and brides and grooms. “It was nice to have four siblings who also knew all the Sondheim lyrics,” Ben says. He always wanted to work with Murphy, the restless creator of a television empire that includes Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, and Pose. Glee, in particular, was formative for Platt, who one year dressed as Mr. Schue, the titular glee club’s director, for Halloween. For The Politician Murphy brought in Gwyneth Paltrow to play Payton’s mother and Jessica Lange to take on the conniving grandmother of Payton’s economically disadvantaged and (possibly) cancer-afflicted running mate. Murphy asked Platt to serve as the show’s executive producer, and in this capacity he cast young actors he knew and admired, including Lucy Boynton and Zoey Deutch. “My favorite thing about doing theater is the family you make,” Platt explains. “You get very close to your castmates. I tried hard to foster that in The Politician because we’re hopefully going to be working together long-term. Everyone was so open to that, especially my contemporaries. I think in her free time GP has to go run her ginormous corporation, but that core group of young people became very close immediately. It’s so much better than doing a film for six weeks and parting ways.”
The actress Beanie Feldstein, Platt’s childhood friend and classmate at the Harvard-Westlake School and the heart of his New York social group, feels it was inevitable that he’d bring the culture of theater to the screen. “Broadway is so ferociously loving,” she says. “And Ben’s love in life—and his gift in life—is to bring people together. All our high school friends benefited from that, and I’ve watched him create that spirit on The Politician. The character is a departure from who he is, but it’s fascinating to watch him playing against type. Honestly, I think only someone with Ben’s depth of humanity could find that character’s redeeming qualities.” Over the course of his run in Dear Evan Hansen, which concluded in November 2017, Platt lived with a monkish discipline that bordered on the hypochondriacal. He rarely saw friends or family, and never on show days. He lost 25 pounds on a rigorous diet. There were two voice lessons and two physical-therapy sessions each week, cupping treatments, zinc and oregano supplements, and other cures. “I have a lot of anxiety that’s tied up in vocal-health stuff,” he says. “I assume the worst. I see a lot of false-alarm doctors.” But he did not realize the extent of his asceticism until he stepped away and resumed a more balanced life. “I was always in a general space of worry about whether I was going to wake up healthy enough to perform. There was a lot of self-imposed silence. Different pills on different days of the week. I really had to turn the volume down on the rest of life.”
It was during the recording of the Evan Hansen studio album that Atlantic Records approached Platt about making a record of his own. Here was another boyhood dream placed on the table sooner than expected, and in a series of sessions in New York, Los Angeles, and London, he found himself with 40 songs to choose from—many of them musings on love and loss. “I’d never sat down to write earnestly from my own perspective,” Platt explains. “But I didn’t see a point in making my own album unless I was going to share a lot of myself. I’m never going to be a pop singer with a lot of accoutrements. Having cool lasers and great dancers is also amazing, but I knew that that was not going to be my niche. I’m a vocalist, and my skill, I think, is being able to be as emotionally open as possible, whether that’s in the guise of some other person or whether it’s just straight-up myself.”
Sing to Me Instead explores Platt’s relationship to family, the transition to adulthood, and most of all his romantic life, the beautiful affairs and those that ended badly. To some fans, the video for the album’s single “Ease My Mind”—an intimate portrait of a pair of lovers, starring Platt and the actor Charlie Carver—was a sort of public coming-out. In fact it was hardly a secret; Platt told his parents he was gay when he was 12. “Anyone that I’ve ever met or worked with for longer than 20 minutes is fully aware,” he says. “Because I was going to be transparent about my own life, it was a no-brainer that I was going to have to address the fact that it’s all dudes that I’m singing about, and I’m not going to change the pronouns to hide anything or make anything more universal.” On September 29, Platt will perform a night of songs at Radio City Music Hall. One of the joys of a year of concerts has been the chance to greet audience members afterward—Purelling furiously all the while—and hear how his own songs have affected them. “When a fan comes and tells me, ‘I came out to my mother on the way here because we were listening to your music,’ or an older queer couple says, ‘We have no artists we listen to together, because we have no one who we feel reflects our experience,’ that’s amazing, and I want to be that for people. I think it’s easy to say that we’ve come to a place where it doesn’t really matter whether you’re gay or straight as long as your abilities are such that you can transform into different kinds of people. I’d love to believe that. But at the end of the day, there will be casting directors who look at the way you’re perceived on social media or by the public, and that will affect the way they view you when you’re trying to come in and perform a straight romantic lead. And I’d like to play many of those in my life.”
Platt would love to do a Martin Scorsese film. He would love to do more theater: Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, maybe, or Bobby in Company. If The Politician carries him through the next few years, he may find that it’s Payton, not Evan, whom he is shaking off his back—especially if he ends up playing the lead in the film version of Dear Evan Hansen, the rights to which his father secured last fall. There’s no script yet. Versatile as he is, Platt’s teenage years are now far behind him. “Do I conceivably still play an 18-year-old?” he asks. “If I do, then count me in.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
