There’s No Stopping Troye Sivan
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Hours ago, Troye Sivan was in Taylor Swift’s arms. He doesn’t brag about it or anything, but shortly after our interview, he posts a snap of the two in a group hug with Lana Del Rey and Jack Antonoff, the whole quartet bathed in Hipstamatic light.
It’s a perfect metaphor for Sivan’s state of being—eminently comfortable cradled between superstars. If the 27-year-old Australian seems immune to being starstruck, it’s probably because he already had his “Party in the U.S.A.” moment—you know, the one where you hop off the plane at LAX equipped with only a dream and a cardigan—by age 13, when he went out to Los Angeles for pilot season. Looking back, he kind of can’t believe he did it. “That is the scariest thought in the world to me,” he says, in awe of his confident younger self. “It sounds so intimidating and insurmountable.”
It turns out that, for Sivan, nothing is insurmountable. Not only did he go on to become a world-famous pop star—banking collaborations with Kacey Musgraves and Ariana Grande along the way—but his acting dance card has filled up, too, with roles in 2018’s Boy Erased and last year’s Three Months. He now has a part in HBO’s The Idol, the long-awaited pop-star drama premiering June 4, featuring The Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp. “It was the first time in my life when I really felt like an actor,” he says, and he’s feeling increasingly confident in that profession. “I’ve got my day job of being a musician, and then when something exciting comes along that I’m interested in or that I feel challenged by, which is pretty much every acting thing ever, I’m so excited to throw my hat in the ring and see what happens without this stress and pressure.”
His knack for instantly making friends seemed to carry over to the Idol set. After working with her, he now calls Depp one of his BFFs, and he’s in awe of her work ethic. “There was not a single time where it was my close-up or someone else’s close-up, where she wasn’t behind the camera giving 1,000 percent after she’s just already given 1,000 percent on her coverage and knocked it out of the park,” he says. “She’s an incredible person to work with, so I feel very lucky to have her in my life.” His costar (and fellow Hollywood Rising honoree) Rachel Sennott is now part of his inner circle too: “[She] is already just such a star. I am so excited for her. I feel like everything that she deserves is coming her way.”
While the show deals with the pressure that comes with being idolized, Sivan himself has personally never felt that strain. He says of his fans, “They dress really well, and they’re really funny, and they are smart and cool and oftentimes queer.” His relationship with them is “this nice two-way street feeling...people are smart and people know when something is genuine and honest. And so never for one second have I even entertained the idea of being like, ‘Maybe I should try and dumb this down,’ or, ‘I’m not really into this, but I think it sounds like it would work on the radio.’ Those aren’t the people that I’m catering to.”
Those fans will be glad to know that despite his rapidly-evolving IMDb résumé, music is still a “constant” in Sivan’s life. He’s been teasing an upcoming album influenced by life back home in post-lockdown Australia, when he was going out clubbing almost every night. “There was a sense of hope and newness and meeting new people,” he says. “I think this is the most proud I’ve ever been of anything I’ve done.” He’s taken his time with the process, saying that “it’s been a really nice luxury to be able to live with the music.”
That period was “the longest that I’d ever stayed in one place since I was 16 or something, and so I really developed a life there,” he says. “That was something that I don’t know that I would’ve carved out time for normally, but it made the music so much richer and I’ve got so much more to say I think than I would’ve had I have been super productive in L.A. just banging it out. It was a lot more introspective because of the way that it was made over such a long period of time, in varying scenarios.”
While he’s carefully vague about the musical contents, “I think what I feel comfortable saying is that it’s full of hope, which I didn’t know it was going to be when I first started making it. I made an EP during COVID [when] I was really in my feelings, going through a massive breakup, processing all of that and writing about it and I was like, ‘God, am I about to write a whole 12-track album or whatever about this?’” The new music reflects a changed outlook: “I have no idea what the future holds, and that is totally okay. I'm so happy to just be in this moment right now with this person that I just met five minutes ago, or my best friends, or whatever. I felt a really strong sense of humanity and connection, and that was very inspiring to me.”
Sivan also went viral in 2021 with an Architectural Digest tour of his Melbourne home that’s received nearly 8 million views on YouTube to date. When I tell him I’m one of the many fans of his interior design sensibilities, he says, “There was a moment where I was getting that more than I was getting, ‘I love your music.’ I didn’t know how to feel [about that]. But I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of home.” He adds that one of his biggest ambitions for this year is “to explore something in the home space.”
And amid a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States, Sivan hopes to be a beacon to queer youth in the same way Lady Gaga was for him. He remembers watching a YouTube video of the star speaking at a Pride parade when he was younger. “I didn’t know any queer people in real life, and just seeing that crowd I was like, ‘Okay, so it is out there somewhere, I just have to go find it.’ And I think that that’s what representation really does. It shows you that your immediate circumstances are not going to be your circumstances forever, that there are people out there who are going to love you and support you, and places where you can feel safe.
“It’s a big relief to know that while all of this really messed-up stuff is happening, people really attempting to send us backwards, that young people can go on TikTok or turn on the Grammys or watch music videos on YouTube and see themselves [represented],” he adds. “I think it’s a lot less suffocating than it used to be, because having access to the representation, it shows you that the world is a big place. Those people who are trying to send us backwards? They’re not everyone.”
Hair by Vernon François for Redken; makeup by Karo Kangas for Westman Atelier; produced by Rhianna Rule.
A version of this story appears in the May 2023 issue of ELLE.
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