Ben Platt: ‘My parents always knew I was gay – I asked for a fog machine at 7’
Ben Platt: ‘My parents always knew I was gay – I asked for a fog machine at 7’
Adam WhiteSat, July 18, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC
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Ben Platt was technically 12 years old when he told his family he liked boys, but there may have been clues. “My parents tell me that they always knew,” he recalls now, surrounded by the tatty, primary school canteen chic of a south London rehearsal space. “I mean, I asked for a fog machine for my seventh birthday. And then – at eight or nine – I asked for clip-on microphones. I asked for my own trash cans because I loved Cats. I think I asked for a boombox.” The fog machine was for a very ambitious bedroom production of Cinderella that he was planning. “You know when she transforms from Cinderella-in-rags to Princess Cinderella? I really needed fog for that.”
Platt was always destined for theatrics – that his father is Marc Platt, the superstar producer behind everything from Wicked to La La Land, was merely the icing on the cake. He’s 32 now, arguably the biggest musical theatre star of his generation, and the winner of a Grammy, an Emmy and a Tony – that last one for his star-making role in the gloopy smash Dear Evan Hansen. It revolved around a lonely teenager whose absent-minded lie about a deceased classmate spirals out of control, and cemented Platt in the public consciousness as a socially anxious naif. And also, at least on stage, a big ol’ heterosexual.
“Book of Mormon, Parade, Evan,” Platt says, running down some of his credits (The Last Five Years, The Sound of Music and The Secret Garden are among the others). “All wonderful characters,” he continues. “All very straight.” Which is why it’s been fun for him to play gay for his major London debut, in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of Midnight at the Never Get. It’s an intimate new musical, with Platt cast as a wistful lounge singer recalling his love affair with his accompanist. We quickly realise we’re watching something neither real nor imagined, but in a fantastical third space between life and death. Platt’s Trevor has chosen this place to spend eternity: a New York dive bar called The Never Get, where the pair were at their happiest. It’s the late Sixties, every queer person is scared, but Trevor is in love.
“As an actor, it’s like I’ve gotten this box of treats that I don’t usually get to open,” Platt says. “I can just lean into my feminine expression and flamboyance and elegance.” We’re meeting at the end of a long day of tech rehearsal, Platt’s brow covered in a thin layer of week-before-launch performance sweat. He’s visibly tired but too polite to say it, and slips off his trainers to stretch and relax. Does he typically think about his characters’ sexualities? “It’s not like straight guys are a different species or anything, but it’s a texture that you need to be conscious of, for sure.”
Both Platt and his husband, the actor Noah Galvin, are in London stage productions at the same time right now – Galvin is starring alongside How I Met Your Mother’s Josh Radnor in Hit Machine at the Soho Theatre. Do they intend to share war stories of bad theatregoers if they experience them?
“I’ve only seen a few things here, but London crowds have been great so far,” he says. “Compared to New York, anyway. No shade to New York, but there’s a lot of phones, a lot of talking and eating. I think there’s better etiquette here.”
Would he pull a Patti LuPone and chew someone out from the stage if he’s proved wrong?
If I want to keep doing this job, I will experience people being mad at me, or people thinking I’ve been miscast
“No!” he laughs. “The format in Never Get is quite direct-address to the audience, so I could probably throw in a little snarky comment if I needed to. But I have hopes that people are going to be wonderful. And it’s just 90 minutes straight through. As long as you turn your phone off, we’re going to get along great.”
Platt grew up in Beverly Hills, and booked his first professional tour at the age of 10, in the musical Caroline, or Change. He worshipped Judy Garland and the late musical theatre actor Gavin Creel, and would listen over and over to his CD of Creel in Thoroughly Modern Millie until his own voice sounded similar. Stephen Sondheim, too, was an inevitable hero, so he’s thrilled to currently be shooting Richard Linklater’s ambitious film adaptation of Sondheim’s time-hopping musical Merrily We Roll Along. It’s being shot over the course of at least 20 years, à la Linklater’s Oscar-winning Boyhood, with Platt starring alongside Beanie Feldstein and Paul Mescal. Three of nine sequences have been filmed so far. “I’m very focused on just not dying,” Platt laughs.
That’s the future sorted at least, but Platt’s earliest breakthrough occurred back in 2015, with Evan – the leading role conceived with Platt in mind, its creators Benj Pasek and Justin Paul having been dazzled by Platt a few years earlier at an audition for one of their other musicals. It became a phenomenon. The New York Times, in 2017, described him as “the toast of Broadway”. “It was tangible how much people were affected by it,” Platt says, particularly Evan’s experiences of depression and suicidal ideation. “Sometimes in little ways, then sometimes I’d be told, you know, ‘I was really considering harming myself before I saw the show, and now I’m not going to do that.’” That sounds incredibly intense, I tell him. “I remember it being very fuelling at first, honestly. Though I stopped doing the stage door for that reason. It became a lot.”
Gregor Milne and Ben Platt in ‘Midnight at the Never Get’ (Johan Persson)
He spent a year on Broadway in the role, then got burnt out. At a dinner with Ryan Murphy, the powerhouse showrunner of Glee and American Horror Story, he said he was keen to play someone different. “Basically someone who f***s,” Platt laughs. That came in the form of The Politician, Murphy’s Netflix hit about a shrewd, self-serving high schooler with eyes on the US presidency. It was 2019, and his career had reset. “Which was incredible, because I knew I couldn’t just be Evan for the rest of my life.”
OK, I say, but why did he then make Dear Evan Hansen: The Movie? Platt grimaces a bit. “I know this is sort of a cop out, but it was Covid,” he says. “Like there were a few months where no one knew if we’d do anything ever again, you know? I definitely grappled with it, but I didn’t know if I could forgive myself if I didn’t do it.”
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Let’s keep this brief: it didn’t go so well. Slathered in heavy make-up to play a character 10 years his junior at the time, Platt suddenly felt miscast in a role that was once very much his own. The internet didn’t let him get away with it. “How Old Does Ben Platt Look in Dear Evan Hansen?” went a Vulture headline, with film critic Alison Willmore dubbing his casting “an act of sabotage that’s near avant-garde”. The movie bombed. Many jokes were made. How did Platt navigate it all?
“By leaving the country,” he laughs. “And it wasn’t just general criticism but the added pain of it being Evan, you know? It felt like being rejected on a huge scale. I think we as a theatre community are so happy whenever one of us gets an opportunity in film, and it felt like such a win that I didn’t get replaced by a movie star and that I got to play this role that I’d created. And then the response just hit so much harder than…” He trails off.
Platt in the maligned ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ film adaptation (Shutterstock)
I ask him if he’s able to be a bit more circumspect about it now.
“Absolutely,” he says. “I mean, if you’d asked me about it in 2021, I would have been like, ‘I quit – I’m never acting again’. But now…” He pauses. “I lived in a very golden, very lucky bubble up to that point, where most things that I’d done had gone really well,” he says. “And I know now that the bubble did have to be popped at some point. If I want to keep doing this job, I will experience people being mad at me, or people thinking I’ve been miscast. It was a bummer that it happened with that specific project, but if you’re in this business, you have to sign up for all of it.”
Time, he says, has been helpful. And I suggest it’s probably toughened him up a little, too. I ask him about his politics. Last year he generated headlines and conservative Jewish backlash for publicising his thoughts on Israel and Palestine, and for expressing support for the leftist New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been a vocal critic of Israel. Platt wrote on his Instagram: “As a queer Jew, whose personal connection to Judaism is cultural, emotional, and interpersonal, and is not defined for me by the state of Israel, I have felt long alienated from this conversation and from a lot of people in my earliest community who feel differently sometimes, to a dogmatic extent.”
What made him speak about it? “I’m my own person,” he says. “I didn’t want to be lumped in, or for there to be assumptions about my feelings. So I just wanted to raise my hand and make clear what my feelings were, and where I stood in the mess of everything that remains a mess. It just felt important. I’m a Jewish person and I just felt like there weren’t a lot of people – contemporaries of mine, or Jews in the public eye – who I could see felt the way that I felt. So to provide a kind of mirror for people who also felt that way was a nice thing to do.”
Platt in ‘Midnight at the Never Get’ (Johan Persson)
What makes all of this particularly thorny, though, is that both Platt’s father and his brother Jonah – who hosts the popular podcast Being Jewish – are ardent supporters of Israel, and have also used their respective platforms to chastise Platt’s friend and regular collaborator Rachel Zegler over her pro-Palestine politics. It’s incredibly difficult for anyone to diverge their politics from those closest to them, I tell Platt, let alone when everyone involved is a public figure.
“I think I’ve just tried to embrace having my own point of view,” he says. When it comes to his own family, he says that “sameness isn’t the only thing that can define love and closeness, you know?” He sighs. “People can co-exist, and divergence of opinion is OK. I just try to be empathetic and understanding while also standing in my own beliefs. That’s kind of all you can do.”
He admits that talking publicly about very divisive issues has been difficult for him. And I agree it feels an odd fit: Platt, by his own admission, is more sappy than strident. “Friends of mine have said I’m one of the most earnest people they’ve ever met,” he says. “Like I love sweetness and warmth. I love romance. I don’t believe in calling anything cringe…” As if to prove this, he tells me he once dressed up as Glee’s mortifyingly shame-free teacher Mr Schuester for Halloween.
“I know how to take criticism in a professional context,” he adds. “Like I love getting notes from a director, I love being told if something isn’t working and that it needs to be better. But outside, in the world, I’m a really sensitive person. I don’t have anywhere near the same kind of thick skin.”
Ben Platt and husband Noah Galvin at the Tony Awards in June this year (Getty)
And it’s the root of his love of musical theatre, he thinks. “I love musicals that are big jazz hands and everything, but my favourite thing is when a musical really earns genuine, earnest pathos,” he says. “I love it when it doesn’t hide behind a wink, or has emotion that doesn’t get undercut all the time.”
“Because everything is dark and getting darker,” he continues. “We have to find some room for not rolling our eyes at stuff.”
‘Midnight at the Never Get’ runs at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory until September
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
