‘Being in America is helpless and dangerous’: artist Ben Platt on nerves, queer music and why she couldn’t do it without her husband | Theater

MeIn practice, Ben Platt is a versatile singer and dancer, with a New York accent. The stage – very famous, as the star of Dear Evan Hansen – is his safe place. In person, in a south London rehearsal room, he’s sweet, honest, timid. He crosses his legs, throws his arms at her. The chatter moves a lot, the body doesn’t feel right.

Platt is candid about the concerns, like a regular friend. So how is it going? “My friendship with my husband has helped me a lot to not worry.” Most of the time I’m still worried, but I feel so much happier now that I’m with him.

Fortunately, Platt comes to London with both men (actor Noah Galvin, who plays with him Click Machine at Soho Theatre) and creative work – music Midnight at Never Get. It takes us to a Greenwich Village gay bar in the 1960s (though the piece, Platt points out, “seems deep and strange”). Platt plays cabaret crooner Trevor. “I don’t really like profanity, because it’s overused, but it’s easy to understand. The New Yorker.” David Cromer he advises, and Platt praises his “very clever hand, he watches what people bring, and then he goes in and carves.”

“Awesome” music is Mark Sonnenblick (KPop Demon Hunters) let Platt sing love songs to another man. Does it make a difference to him? “100 percent. I grew up doing musicals – years and years, many shows – but I’ve never played an unknown person on stage. To play a three-parter who sings about poverty and a lot of love, it’s very comfortable.”

Midnight in Never Get isn’t particularly political, but it comes at a time when progress toward gay rights seems to have stalled, even regressed, in Platt’s home country. “Being American feels helpless and dangerous,” he admits. “But being in New York gives me hope and optimism.” The new mayor Zohran Mamdani represents “another political group, unlike the painful noise for the sake of the painful noise”.

At 32 years old, Platt has the experience of a quarterback. His first school performance, at the age of six, saw him dressed in a glittering jacket as the prince in Cinderella. “I often remember the thrill of getting ready, the thrill of being in a tizzy.” Professional gigs quickly followed – the anxious young Ben was once again focused and self-directed. He said: “I wanted to grow up quickly. I was hungry to be like the adults I worked with, to be counted among them.”

The show that made Platt – as an actor and a person – was Dear Evan Hansenplaying a struggling high school hero from early stage reading to Broadway. I had never been asked to do something this difficult. Committing to the show, he points out, means “putting my whole life into being dumb. I put my civilization on fire, and I just stayed in this person’s place for years.”

Platt came out with Tony and in 2021 he was cast lead the next video. This wasn’t fun: Platt was teased for being too old at 27, the son of a producer. “It was difficult, but it’s a lesson you have to learn in this business, that sometimes things don’t go well and you have to let the rollercoaster go in to get back up. That behavior made it a little painful – but we’re moving forward.” So the brouhaha didn’t ruin her relationship with Evan Hansen? “No, no. It was life-changing in every way. I’m glad the film exists, and I hope history will be kind to it.”

Earlier this year, Platt used art for the Met Gala, his jacket describing Seurat’s paintings that inspired Stephen Sondheim Sunday in the Park With George. It’s a role that Platt admires above all others. “George, George, George,” he sighs. “It’s everything that’s meaningful to me in music. It’s about committing to being an artist – how you have to live in your mind, and that’s a beautiful thing, but also a hard truth.”

Platt may think of the writer as “my rabbi, my imam, I live my life by his words” – but he never played Sondheim’s professional role. In this film, however, he goes deeper into making Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s 1981 musical follows his central trio back and forth, from middle age to the hopeful years of adolescence – and director Richard Linklater has filmed it, in real time. “These songs are 19 or 20 years old,” explains Platt. If there are three years between scenes, “we wait exactly three years, so that our characters grow up equally”. Platt and his colleagues Paul Mescal and Beanie Feldstein are now about a third of the way through. “We have to finish in 2038. I’ll be 45. It’s absolutely crazy, and like a family reunion that happens every few years.”

Any other wishes? “Like every gay person in the world, I hope to make Angels (in America, written by Tony Kushner) at some point.