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role, in the Netflix series The Politician, Rya n
Murphy’s dark satire of ambition and entitle-
ment among the palms and pools of Santa Bar-
bara. 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, Mur-
phy 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 Pay-
ton 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 Pay-
ton 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 polit-
ical 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 prob-
lems,” 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 Brad-
dock 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 ac-
tor, 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 em-
pire 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 moth-
er and Jessica Lange to take on the conniving
grandmother of Payton’s economically disad-
vantaged and (possibly) cancer-afflicted run-
ning mate. Murphy asked Platt to serve as the
show’s executive producer, and in this capacity
he cast young actors he knew and admired, in-
cluding 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 child-
hood friend and classmate at the Harvard-West-
lake 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 Han-
sen, 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 sup-
plements, and other cures. “I have a lot of anx-
iety 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 se-
ries 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 emo-
tionally 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 relation-
ship 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—Purell-
ing 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.” @
