Ryan Murphy continues to be one of the busiest people in the industry. Not only did he just announce he will be adapting the Broadway musical “The Prom” as a movie for Netflix, but he also told Variety that he’s holding fundraisers for presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
“I’m having a benefit for Kamala Harris at my house on Friday in LA,” he told Variety on Tuesday night while hosting a special performance of “The Prom” to raise money for Hetrick Martin, GLAAD, and the Trevor Project. “And I’m having a benefit for Pete [Buttigieg] in June.”
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He’s been particularly struck by Buttigieg’s reception as the first openly gay contender for the presidency. “I always make a joke that I’m running for gay president, so I’m thrilled,” he said, laughing. “I think the party and the voters will say who’s the best, but my job is to support, and I believe in both those candidates. In a dream world, they’d unite. I think that’d be a great ticket.”
Murphy said he’ll be turning “The Prom” into “a huge Netflix movie event” slated for release next September, in the hopes of “changing hearts, minds, and votes” leading up to the 2020 election.
Like the musical’s young heroine, Murphy grew up in Indiana and was barred from taking his boyfriend to prom. “I went with my best female friend, and as a protest I wore six-inch yellow platform boots as a tribute to Bananarama, so I got a little radical renegade-ness in,” he told Variety. “But I was talking to the producer [Bill Damaschke] after the show, and I said, ‘I wish there had been something like this for me when I was that age so that I didn’t feel so alone.’”
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Also talking proms on the red carpet were Glenn Close and Billy Porter.
“I want you to be my date,” Close told the “Pose” star when they found each other on the red carpet before the show. “I never got to go to a prom. I’m wearing black to mourn.”
“We’ll go to the prom now!” the “Pose” star replied, laughing. He later told Variety that the exchange wasn’t far off from his own experience as a teenager. “I took a nice Jewish girl to the prom, Alexandra Berger. We met in first period of senior year, and on day two, she asked me to the prom,” he said, grinning at the memory. “She was like, ‘Yeah, let’s just do that together.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, girl, yes we should.’ It was fun!” Berger knew he was gay, though not everyone did. “After the prom, we went back to her house and fell asleep in her bed together, and her mother freaked out,” he recalled. “She was like, ‘Mom, what do you think is gonna happen?’” The two have stayed in touch ever since. “She lives in Brooklyn with triplets. I’ve got her number right now!”