Billy Porter won an award for his performance in Pose as the drag ball emcee Pray Tell. He turned the fairy godmother into a tough-talking fairy, as he puts it, in the update of Cinderella. Porter is required to play small, wounded and sometimes bitter, without any, in Our Son, as Gabriel, a meek stay-at- home dad divorcing his husband, Nicky. Porter always knew he could pull off such a role, but has rarely been considered for it. Billy was asked how he act like that at the premiere. The world has a difficult time understanding that serious and fabulous do coexist.
This is how Porter speaks most of the time. He compares himself to four-time Oscar nominee Viola Davis on three separate occasions, and ends his musings on a ceasefire in the Middle East with the word "doll". He came across as a born orator when he peered out from a hotel room in Florida, dressed casually in a white T-shirt with rainbow accents. Porter is the first time he has been able to properly flex his dramatic chops on screen. He said that he could connect to the complexity of a marriage. He revealed during our conversation that working on Our Son ended with a case of life imitating art because his mother died a week before. He says that he probably wouldn't be married after the movie was done because he was married at the time. His divorce from his husband of six years, Adam Smith, felt vastly different from that of Gabriel and Nicky, and that is all I can say.
Porter wanted to play a complex queer character named Gabriel when he was trying to make it as an actor. He moved to New York after graduating from the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. He soon found that he was not getting a lot of complex roles for Black performers and that his big break was as the Teen Angel in the 1994 Broadway revival of Grease. He was a clown with 14 inches of rubber hair on his head.
He realized that he had to shift the consciousness of the people in order to find meaningful work. He saw Viola Davis, a friend of mine, not close, colleague, and we know each other, as an example of how a serious Black performer could make it in the suffocating Hollywood. There is a fullscreen image of Porter and Cabello in Cinderella.
He says he was like, "That's what I'm gonna do." She played every crack mother, every mother of a drug addiction, and every stereotypical dark-skinned Black woman role they threw at her. He decided that he didn't care about being pigeonholed in the business and that he would take the queer roles and make them more dignified by the time the industry was ready to give a serious, nuanced role to a Black gay man. Porter has been working in entertainment for more than 30 years, and has had a front-row seat to the changes that have taken place in the industry. He was an outspoken critic of studio chiefs such as Disney's Bob Iger, who suggested that striking workers' demands were unreasonable, and he also revealed that the instability from the strike meant that he was putting his house on the market. He feels like Sag and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) came to some really good terms, but he still doesn't like that the burden of the strike still gets passed on to us. The people in the C-suite are still making money even though our deals are going away. He asked, "Whose fault is it that the business can't sustain itself and is going to implode?" Being an artist, we are often blue collar.
Porter claims that the middle class of working actors have shrunk because it took so long for streamers to negotiate with Sag-Aftra. It is not okay.
Porter describes himself as being one of the extremely blessed ones who is able to generate income through other means, and he has a brand new pop album out on Republic records. I can go back to doing a Broadway show, you know what I mean. He says he has only enough to pay his mortgage for four months.
Porter as Pray Tell in Pose has a view image.
Porter is an impressive multi-hyphenate, and he made his directorial debut in the Amazon Prime teen film Anything's Possible, about a trans high-school student. He took a screenwriting course at the University of California in Los Angeles in the early 30's when his career dried up, and now he's co-writing a biographical film about the revolutionary writer and activist James. I have been waiting for people to tell the stories of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and I want to be the one to tell them. He says he will do it himself, and that the Black gay man who embodies that in today's age is the best person to tell it. It is an important story to tell, and I am very blessed to be in this time where it will be told.
Porter claims that Baldwin's story couldn't have been told before this time because nobody gave afuck. Porter seems to have thought this idea through in his head, in a way that doesn't translate out loud. The colour of green is not black, white, yellow, or Muslim.
He hopes to push a female-oriented film like Barbie to box office success in the way he hopes with Black queer stories. Barbie is green, she can do whatever she wants, because they want that. We cannot lose sight of that, so I am trying to figure out what that looks like for myself.
Porter says that a piece of the novelist's writing will be used as a framing device through which to explore his whole life. Baldwin was a supporter of the rights of the Palestinians, as was Porter, who was against the cultural boycott of a film festival in Tel Aviv in 2021. Porter is supportive of a two-state solution when he is asked how he will navigate Baldwin's relationship with the Palestinian rights movement in the script. He says that this is not his hill, and he will not die on it. Please don't make me a poster child for what's happening over there. I don't want to be in the conversation because I don't know enough about it. I don't know, it's been going on for thousands of years over there. I think we should stop doing that and the Palestinians are not the ones who started the shit.
The Golden Globes will be held in LA in 2020.
He says that he doesn't know what happened, but that the extremists retaliated after doing something horrible. It breaks my heart that we are always at war. I don't know what to say, and I don't know what to do, other than hug you and say I'm sorry, what can we do to fix it?
Porter is the most worked up of all the people we have talked to, but in a split second, he composed himself. I have to be true to James Baldwin, he is a character and there is nothing to navigate. He doesn't know what version of the Israel-Palestine conflict was when he was around. The man has been dead since 1987, he says, and he has been getting a lot of abuse online.