Jeremy O. Harris

Pruce's questionnaire. It was originally an eighteenth century parlor game meant to reveal an individual's true nature. But with so many questions, there wasn't really an opportunity to expand on anything. So I took the format of Pruce's questionnaire and adapted What I think are seven of the most important questions you could ever ask someone. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least

about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that has grown out of a personal disaster. The more people we ask, the more we begin to see what makes us similar and what makes us individual.

I've gathered a group of really remarkable people who I am honored and humbled to have had a chance to engage with. My guest today is Jeremy oh Harris. It's hard to know where to begin an introduction to Jeremy because to me, he is a force that has such diverse impact. It feels limiting to say specifically what he does or who he is, And actually part of his fundament seems to be challenging the way in which we quantify a lot of things. So it's probably right that

I don't know what to say. He is definitively the author the highly acclaimed Slave Play, which has become the most nominated non musical play in the history of the Tonys, with twelve nominations. I won't say explicitly what the play is about, because you should see it or find it and read it and think. But the super redux version is that it addresses themes of sexuality and racial trauma in America. Out magazine called him the queer black savior

theater needs. I would rejoin and editor to say he is the queer black savior we all need, and if systems are grumbling, as they surely seem to be, voices like Jeremy's are the ones I'd like to hear loudest during the rebuild. He writes under different names, he explores different mediums of art, acting, playwriting, screenwriting, producing, and as a person and a rare talent at the forefront of a new generation of emerging artists, he is dismantling the

idea of personal success and fame being the endgame. By using carved out fees from big deals in fashion and in television to establish funds and micro grants for theaters and libraries. He is quite literally lifting up and creating opportunities for others in his community and beyond. Whenever I talk to him, I feel like I'm talking to the future,

a super tall, hot, progressive future. Correct me, jere I mean if I'm wrong, but I believe Slave Play became the most nominated Tony in the history of the Tony's. It's the most nominated Tony ever, It's the most nominated to It's been it's a Tony that has been nominated so many times its name is now Anthony Slave play was nominated more times than any other than any other play. I think Hamilton's has the most of any thing best

because musical is cheat and can have more. You know, He's best score, best book, best orchestrations, like, we don't get those. So now, what relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? Oh that's so good. Um, I mean I'm probably so dark. It's probably like you know, the Young Girl and the Soldier and blasted the Sarah Kane play, like really dark. Oh my god, I mean I really really really love Magnolia. I really love Earl Partridge and

his Wife that Julianne Moore plays. She married this guy for money and then as he's dying, she realizes how much she loves him. That is kind of what being in love is like for me. Obviously, adoreless person. You're able to be in public the face of the adoring partner, but in private moments you're like, oh, wow, you're smelly. You touched me all the time, you do, you know, whatever the thing is, and then like you know, the minute that you shut the bathroom door, You're like, where

are they? I need their warmth again, you know, because there's something about human beings where like you kind of want to nip the person that's closest to you. It's like what we do with our parents, you know. And the minute that you've gotten someone into your trust circle, you do in your mind convince yourself that they're not everything you want in the minute that they're about to leave, where they could go that's to you wanted the best.

And I think that part of the work of being a good partner and a good person love is to minimize the moments of nipping that are natural and normal, and lean into who you are to the world, and lean into who you are when they're about to leave in those moments when it's just you two lying in bed. So, do you think that the specter of loss is then part of the defining factor of love for you? The idea that that person will be lost to you, or could be lost to you, but ultimately will be lost

to you is actually what gives love of shame. Yes, I actually think that having a recognition that this person could be gone at any second should be the founding principle of any love magicure and or any healthy relationship, because that that would mean that you would treat it a little bit better. You wouldn't take it for granted. And I think that oft and we we take people for granted because we think that we're going to be eternal,

you know. But even when I think about the fact that thirty years feels like it's passed so quickly, I'm just like, I'm going to be out of here. Even if I lived to seventy or eighty, you know, I'm gonna be out of here in a moment. I know. It's a heartbeat, it's a heart Maybe that's also this time. I don't know about you, but since this pandemic, I

felt like time has stretched, it's time slowed down. Time stop being this thing that I was always chasing after and actually became so present because all of the distraction and all of those branches that were really a lot of dead wood, kind of a cut away. But also, don't you feel like those three months at the very top of the year felt like forever, like at the very top of quarantinshure. Well, now I think about it from right now, I do, But at the time it

felt like days were stretchy. It felt like nine am lasted until four. It felt like every moment was every conversation Shan, everything that we cooked, everything that we ate, every embrace. Yes, it felt distilled. You know, you couldn't really have written it. And it's been believable or been anything other than sort of Ryan Murphy kind of giant. You'll never believe this. Here. Let me put on a giant show for you. It's actually still Ryan Murphy. It's

like it's Ryan Murphy and Shonda. Ryan's actually doing a cross over episode. It really is. It is exactly. It's them just passing back a script over a weekend and each of them perhaps drinking slightly more than the other with each new draft, and it's getting more and more insane and more and more ridiculous. All right, downing, So can you tell me in your life about something that

has grown out of a personal disaster stuff? I mean, there's been so many things, but I think the thing and I know this because I went this amazing healer and the swaman was like, wow, what happened when you were nineteen? Like it's still living in your body. She's like, it feels like a big trauma. And I was like, Oh, that's so weird. That was the year that I got cut from drama school. You know, I went to this drama school. They accepted fifty two kids, only twenty sis

got to stay. I liked it because it sounded like Survivor or a big Brother or something like. They turned training to be an actor into the Bachelor, and so I was really excited because I worked my ass off and like I had done the math, I was like, great, inside of my section, I'm in the top five percent. If they're cutting half of us, I can't be cut from my section. But there are five black men here,

and amongst them, I'm definitely the weirdest one. So either they're gonna want me because I'm the weirdest one, or they're gonna be like, even though he's one of the best, he's gonna get cut because he's really weird. So I just did everything I could be weird myself over the year. So I came to school with really long hair. I cut off all with my hair, like halfway through the year.

He was like radical transformation, And you know, I worked really hard, and I was still one of the people that got cut, and some of the cruelest things that I've ever been said to me were said to me when I was eighteen years old about why I was cut, saying was true of other actors. And you know how this is like these people are working with people at the beginning of their development into young adults, and like decided to say this the kinest things to them because

they can because Heinu's things are said to them. They said a whittling down every year, and we were a part of the lucky community because they stopped whittling people down the second and third years, so it was just like one cut instead of multiple. I think that is so hideous because it means you could never actually relax. It's like the hunger. Yes, it's like you totally know that there's a Gaillo scene hanging above your head every day that you go to school. I mean, what a

dreadful way to try and learn. Yeah. One of my closest friends there, Erica, who also got cut. You know, she had come from a school where she had never done a play before in her life. She got into a drama school, I having never done a play before her life, and she didn't more than one for me, And it's like let's that girl get in, Like she just gets to stay for all four years, because like what the fuck? But she came from a really rough community and she wasn't used to going to a room

with a bunch of white kids and crying. She's like, I don't cry in front of people. You don't do that. She's in these classes with all these kids, many of whom come from privilege, who are able to weep form command all the time about anything, and her teachers are like, you feel too hard, but you don't want to share yourself. She's like, no one's giving me a reason to cry, Like, give me a scene, I'll do that. Then I'm just

gonna sit and cry and gossip with you. Anyway. That was really difficult for me, and I'll never forget that. One of my professors told me, she's like, well, Jeremy, you're just not castable. Yeah, She's like, you have the face of the child, a body of demand. You won't be cast into your at least thirty five forties. So you should think about going to grad school for acting. And right now, you know you seem to like writing,

so do that. And I was like what what? But it's incredible because of what did come out of that, Well, Yeah, because I immediately decided I was going to prove her I could be castable. So I got asked every major show that was happening in Chicago at the time. And then two years later I went to l A and that was when I started telling me I was a writer, which is what they had told me at school, and

my entire identity changed after that. It's so extraordinary. I think I overuse the matrixes of reference points of touchstone in my life, but I do often think, like you know the scene where he goes to see the oracle

and she tells him he's not the one. I just think that those moments in our lives where life is telling you, no, it's absolutely not you, it's not you at all, they are the moments out of which the most grows because you have to disagree with it in order to carry on in a way, or you have to become something else. Yes, I was the only kid in my class to graduate from drama school without an agent.

You know, it's just me and my mom and all these other kids standing with their agents and their parents after the last performance with like warm white wine, and I was like everyone has an agent here except me, and my mom was like, well, I don't have an agent either. That's amazing. That's literally something my mom would say to me. Yeah. I mean it was really hard

and it was really harsh. I think it's really interesting though, that the people who were so unsupportive of you as an actor told you that you were a writer and that you should go and do that, and the fact that you actually did go and do that, and now you can be an actor, you can be a writer, you can do whatever you want. It's interesting. I like it when the people who were apparently limiting us, we're actually giving us exactly what we needed to grow. Yes, yes,

it's everything. Were you a student when he wrote Slave Play? Yeah? Yeah, my god, Jeremy. Basically, Slave Play haunted all three years of my graduate degree because in my first year I started working on it and writing it, and then my second year we put it up in the fall and there was a big fallout with the administration and a lot of my professors who really hated the play and

tortured me. And then the next half of the year I was trying to get some of the people who were really messed up about that fire um and then in my third year I wrote a thesis play about how that experience had been the worst thing ever while the play was going up in the city. What was

the central beef that they had with your play? Well, it was mainly a power thing, which is one of the reasons why it was most frustrating and really drawing, because it had very little to do with the actual like nuts and bolts of my play, as I could see visa vie their relationship to the other work that was happening around me. It was more so the fact that they told me to cut twenty minutes out of the play and I said, I don't want to do that.

That note doesn't make sense to me, and they said, well, we're telling you to do this, and it was about like this power thing, and I think the more I've dug in my heels and was like, no, I think that's a bad note, the more angry they got. And it was just like the Battle of wills that ended with a professor yelling at me and sending me really hate his emails and just having like a full mental spiral.

Do you think it made you connect? Forced each connect with the thesis of the play even more because you were defending it so profoundly. Do you think that you you kind of bonded with your play more because of that extreme conflict? Well, yeah, I mean I think it may be bond with the performers, especially the performer playing Knisha. A lot at Yale is played by this woman named

Intra Neet Crow Legacy, who's an amazing actress. And obviously, as you've you've been to drama school, you know that when someone's actually just doing a power play, they'll change their tactics really well. And so the tactic became, well, it's not about the twenty minutes in that part so much. It's just that those twenty minutes are so bad that the endings the worst thing I've ever seen. I can't

believe this actress is doing this. If you're not gonna change these twenty minutes, you have to change the ending. And so I tried to change the ending, and I came back and his actors was like, why are you changing this? Your play is saying this to me. She said something to the room about her character and why she understood what was happening in the play. That was like, my secret, it's for why I had written the play.

It's like someone's naming all the reasons why I had written the play from the point of view of acting in this thing, and so I felt so immediately um indicated. Yeah, And it also made me know that at the end of the day, great performers, they are great ensemble are more important than teachers. No wonder how many you know, McArthur Pullitzer, O bis they've won. You know what I mean? Well,

you'd think that. But by the way, speaking as someone who has worked with extraordinarily collaborative people and then slightly more autocratic directors and producers, I must say that it's very refreshing to hear you say that, Jeremy, because it is a collaboration. You're all working towards the same thing. And I think sometimes actors certainly get the reputation that it's really just about self aggrandizement. And I really is

biggest soliloquy as opposed to no best idea wins. Yes, And I love because you're a writer and an actor and a director and a kind of conceiver of art that you recognize that. I feel vindication as an actor knowing that you say what you bring him when you're inside a character, you can sometimes give a perspective that is unique because you're living inside your particular piece of

this greater piece of work. One of the things that's most invigorating about getting all of these Tony nominations is that twelve Tony nominations have very little to do with Jeremy o' harris writing this play right, and everything to do with the community of people around this play that I wrote. Those things really matter to me because the family that we made with this play was really tight,

and we listened really well to each other. And I think what's really exciting what the Tony is that everyone seeing James Society, Morier, Jachina Cala Congo, Annie McNamara, Shalia Latour, Auntie Blanks and Wood, Lindsay Jones, G G D D Clint and Robert and not to mention like Paul Sullivan and it ain't a who were the three actors of our eight that didn't get nominated, but who obviously play the gift twelve nominations, they're still being celebrated as well,

the community saying like, no, you guys really came together and you fought for each other. And that makes me soory because Arena and Shalia were in the first reading of its play, So I just wanted to say that Slave Player also did something really extraordinary. Jeremy insisted on there being a subsidized ticket program so that when you would go to buy a ticket, you would be also able to buy a ticket for someone who maybe couldn't

afford to go to the theater. And what that did for the community and the anomaly that that was I'm really genuinely hope becomes a normal practice on Broadway in the West End, in every theater loving city in the world. It was extraordinary the amount of first time ticket buyers or theater girls who went to see Slave Blay because they were able to what that speaks to you about community and what that speaks to you about what the theater is always purporting to be about, which is about

coming together and than the stories of our community. For the community, that was one of the most amazing. I mean, beyond the extraordinary impact of the play and what it forced us all to meditate on and think about and talk about forever, is that notion of community for me and availability to everybody, not just to the famous people, the rich people, the white people, but to everybody. It's

an incredibly special play for so many reasons. When I hope that it stops being an anomaly and actually just becomes, you know, the norm same. I mean, it's really nice to be an anomaly because it means you're special, you're one of a kind. But when being one of a kind means that you're like opening the doors for more people than it's not fun. You want to know that more people are doing that so that this thing you love a can survive and be can be experienced by

as many people as possible. What person, place, or experience has most altered your life, well, I think I think because she's constantly offering the direction of my life. It would have to be my mom, because she had me when she was nineteen and came to a community that does not have very many opportunities for people of color, especially women of color, and worked really hard to psyphon off as many opportunities as she could for me, even

if that meant denying herself certain opportunities. And so that's why I think she's most afted in my life. She put me in the private school so that she couldn't afford to send me to and she's always sounded like an extraordinary person. She's the absolute Disneys and I wouldn't be the person I am now without her. Um. I love that. I love that. I'm glad it's your mom. So here we go. I would like you to please

tell me where and when you were happiest. This is really it is actually really funny because I just answered this question for g Q and and for some reason felt like a fake answer at the time. But the more I think about, the more real it sounds in my head. I think I felt the happiest when I was at McDowell in New Hampshire, which is where I

went when I was twenty six year old. It's where I decided I was going to go to grad school, and it was where I really, for the first time in my life, I felt like an artist because I've been welcomed into this historic colony of artists. For people who don't know McDowell, it's the oldest artistic commune in the country. James Baldwin wrote Giovanni's room there. Tanahusey Coats wrote there the color purple is written there. I'm naming only the black people like Lennard Bernstein went there and

it's artists of all disciplines. It's painters, writers, composers, playwrights. And you endowed with this. You invited, you singled out and invited. No, you're not invite, you apply. So it's an application process is highly competitive. So many writers I know haven't gotten in. And it's a place that's really rare because you can be there with someone who's won four pool and surprises, you know, Michael Chaban, can be there with someone who's only written a short play, which

is what I had done. Like I had only written a thirty minute play. I had no real credits. I just had good recommendations. And you tell them what you want to write while you're there, and I told him I want to write this play called Daddy. And so I got there, you know, and I'm sitting at a table with the likes of Michael, Alma Raida and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and I was like, great, what it was?

It was really lovely. But I think that there was a moment there when I had such insane imposter syndrome, because you know, I started out as an actor, I didn't start out as a playwright. And I lived in l A for six years sort of telling people I was the play right because I didn't want to tell people I was an actor. And then one day someone was just like, well, are you actually a writer? And I was like, I think I am. And then I started writing, but I still felt like I was tricking

people right, like that I was illegitimate. And meanwhile, I'm telling my mom, who's working three jobs to support herself, my sister and me, well past the age that people get supported. Where I'm coming from, there's no idea of the young artist who gets helped from their mom at twenty four to help pay their rent. Right. My mom is doing something that's like a huge anomaly for our community. And I keep promising her, like I promise you, mom, if you just help me out one more time, it's

gonna work out. Just give me a few more years, another month, like if I don't figure it out by the time I'm thirty, I'll go back to school and become a lawyer or something. And so I was there. I had all this imposter syndrome, and then one day someone was talking about something and someone turned me like, Jeremy, what do you think? And I was like, well, I

think this. I don't know if you've ever read this thing, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but everyone the table was like, wow, oh my god, that's so impressive, because that's so great, and the like changed the course

of the thing. Everyone started asking more questions about what I just said, and in that moment I realized whoa, Like, I'm really here, and I went outside to have a cigarette and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who is the MacArthur Genius Grant winning writer of Random Family, came up to me and was like, that was so beautiful what you just said back there, and I was like, it's so weird.

Everyone here feels so beyond me, Like I don't know that I can even catch up with where they are in the world, and the fact they care about what I have to say is so weird. And She's like, why is it weird we're all sitting at the same table. In that moment, I think I felt so happy because it felt like this thing I've been promising my mom that like my difference meant that I was, that I

was a part of a community of artists, was finally affirmed. Right, All of our hard work was affirmed in that moment, so do you feel a sense of belonging and the vindication of everything that your mom had believed in you and put into it qualifies that happiness? Yes, it shapes that happiness. I love that Jeremy. I'm looking at the Barack Obama book right now. He's so handsome. He's so handsome. He's so handsome and so kind, and I love his wife so much. It's almost like they're superheroes. I do.

I put them in the same category. I really want to interview him because he's been saying some really interesting things recently. He did this interview about his book. He was just like talking too, how crazy the Republican Party it's got. Now. He's like, you know, there's just so much crazy stuff. You know, one minute they're saying Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring, and the next minute they're saying that Joe Biden is a socialist, Like who

are these people? And it's just like, I get what he's trying to say, but also like saying Joe Biden is a socialist, it's not as egregious an idea as someone running a pedophile ring, But the fact that those two things are in the same level in that anecdote said something Freudian, and I'm just like, someone needs to mind this because you also came out of the gate.

It's like, you know, this wild progressive, and yet like he's aligning himself so often with this in drists, in our parties and ways that I find he definitely doesn't have to unless that's just really how he feels, in which case it makes me a little sad. But I want to challenge him on some of that. Oh my god, I so now I want to hear that Jeremy Harris, Brock, Obama and Tod. I think that would be really good because I was st talking about sex because he's a leo,

so he walks around with pelvis first. You know, he has like a real like b D about him, which I think was the most attractive thing. And I just kind of we're talking about like I was like, but you were a nerd. But when did you start getting late? Like was it in college or was it in grad school? Like when did you start to know him your sexual power? When did your not get its freak on? Yeah? Exactly exactly, But I want to know that now too. I didn't even know I wanted to know that until you just

said that. Now I'm going to think about it a lot. I mean, it's kind of hot and also feels naughty. Yes, And in his book apparently he talked about how he used to say the word fag in the seventies. And I want to be like, but did you ever make up with a guy? Because you feel like you did. It's so funny here we are kind of federating a bomb or like putting him on his pedestinal. Meanwhile, you're like, did you kiss a guy? Because I feel like you did. That's what we all really want to know. Come on,

I can't wait to see you again. I can't wait to see you again. And I thank you with all my heart for doing this. I'm thrilled about the idea of everything that you are going to do. It makes me, It makes me happy. Thank you. In closing, I would like to tell you that Jeremy co wrote this movie Zola, which a Nick's a Bravo based on tweet spy Asaiah King. Jicks also directed the movie, and it's out June. This woman, as Iah King tweeted, in real time and experience she

decided to be a part of. And I won't give anything away but it is. It's an extraordinary premise and I really cannot wait to see the finished film. It premiered at Sundance last year. Jeremy also is adapting with the Ziza Barnes Britt Bennett's novel The Vanishing Half, which I also can't wait to see, and that will also be out later this year. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer

Morgan Lavoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me and man Gesh Hetty Cador. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and a Nick Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescadore, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support Henry Driver two