R Y A N
MURPHY
BUILT A NEW
HEARTLAND
The renegade writer-producer-director’s Netflix deal is worth
$300 million. Inside the making of his blockbuster empire
BY SAM LANSKY
Ryan muRphy is Taking a RaRe bReaTheR. We’Re
in his tidy trailer on a set in Hollywood, at the end of
the last day of shooting for The Boys in the Band, a
play that Murphy revived on Broadway in 2018 and
is now producing as a feature film for Netflix. Out-
side, the studio lot is surprisingly sedate. A golf cart
whirs past. A colleague brings him a single shot of
espresso. Murphy, 53, schedules his days into short
intervals—15 minutes, or 30—and works seven days
a week. “I say I can’t keep going at this pace,” he says.
“But then I have a full physical, and it’s like, I’m fine.”
For someone with at least 15 projects in theworks, he’s unusually hands-on with all of them:
writing, directing and producing. He still has two
shows on Fox—9-1-1 and an upcoming spin-off—and
three on the cable network FX: Pose, American Hor-
ror Story and a new installment of American Crime
Sto r y, which will follow the Monica Lewinsky scan-
dal. That would be a busy slate for anyone—but this
is the peak- content era, where each day seems to
bring news of another creator defecting from estab-
lished studios and networks to streaming services—
whether heavyweights like Netflix, Amazon and
Hulu or upcoming launches such as Apple TV+,