To me, sex is a great way to get out of the house,” says John Cameron Mitchell, all wry poise and puckish understatement. “You open the door, meet someone. It doesn’t have to be the be-all and end-all. I have met a lot of wonderful people through something as crass as Grindr, you know.” Grindr, he says again. “Not a name I would’ve chosen.”
As it happens, Mitchell, creator and star of the adored, genderbending queer musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, had “kind of invented Grindr” himself back in 2006, presaging the arrival of the gay hook-up app in his transgressive sex dramedy Shortbus. That film – a cult hit, brimming with unsimulated scenes of sex, masturbation, orgies and autofellatio – was Mitchell at his most provocative. Elsewhere, he’s flirted with the mainstream, acting in shows such as Girls, Joe vs Carole (playing Tiger King’s oddball felon Joe Exotic), and Netflix’s The Sandman.
Mitchell, wearing a sleeveless top and with streaks of dyed white zig-zagging through his hair, is offloading his thoughts on sex, art, and David Bowie by the window of a north London cafe. The 62-year-old actor, writer, and filmmaker is in London to sing: over the weekend, he performed at Pride; on Tuesday night, he’s on stage at the Adelphi Theatre for a night of Hedwig numbers, Bowie covers, and more. (Guest performers include Boy George, Michael Cerveris and Drag Race’s Divina de Campo.)
Bowie was, creatively speaking, a guiding light for Mitchell. Hedwig, a Tony-winning rock musical (with songs by Stephen Trask) about a German singer coerced into botched gender reassignment surgery, would likely never have existed without the androgynous glam of Ziggy Stardust. Bowie himself was a champion. “He put his money where his mouth was, invested in our LA production – and lost every cent,” Mitchell grins.
If there’s something else Mitchell shares with rock’s eternal chameleon, it might be “mutability” – both professional and personal. The son of an American military general and a Glaswegian artist and teacher, Mitchell had a peripatetic childhood, moving between army bases around Europe and the US. “I had to keep changing my accent,” he says. “But then all those things combined to create something that was unique for me.”
Mitchell’s early theatrical career included the original production of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, and Broadway’s first staging of The Secret Garden. “The TV stuff – things like MacGyver and the new Twilight Zone – tended to be more for money,” he says. “Eventually, I learned to say no to things I didn’t really need to do, but you need money to do that.”
He mentions Book of Love. The 1990 rom-com, directed by Robert Shaye, cast Mitchell as a character who was initially “really homophobically written”. There was, he recalls, “no perspective in the Eighties, but the director heard me out and changed it… actually, the film couldn’t deal with an openly gay character, so he made him straight.” But Shaye took the encounter to heart: a few years later, he founded New Line Cinema, the studio behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and produced the Hedwig film adaptation.
“He always told me that [the pivotal moment] was me standing up to him and saying, ‘This work is really homophobic and needs to be fixed,’” Mitchell says. “I didn’t yell at him. I didn’t cancel him. I said, ‘How can it be better?’ And that’s my way. I’m not into cancellation. I don’t like a lot of the political correctness of the last few years, because – with good intentions – it becomes its own mob justice, and doesn’t allow for redemption.”
Once Mitchell starts talking, there’s no slowing him. “Also, who the hell voted you the judge?” he continues. “It’s really dangerous for art when people say, ‘That’s not your story to tell.’ What the hell does that mean? All art needs to be autobiographical? How boring! Wouldn’t that just make a Netflix of narcissists?” He cocks an eyebrow in a sort of exaggerated squint – his go-to reaction face.
I just never liked ‘Rent’. It probably spread a lot of love and tolerance, but what it was about – an East Village group of people making rock music – didn’t compute
Mitchell came out in his private life in 1985, aged 22; it would be another seven years before he discussed his sexuality publicly in a New York Times profile. “I was always open in my work; I wasn’t closeted,” he says, “but I hadn’t really had any public attention up to that point. I knew a lot of closeted actors, and some of them were horrified that I was committing career suicide. But by then, I just didn’t want to work with someone who wouldn’t work with me because I’m gay. And… oh my God, is that a rat?”
I turn my head and see what indeed looks like a rodent in the beak of a bird flying inches above the ground, parallel with traffic down Holloway Road. “I didn’t know seagulls ate rats,” Mitchell says, dryly.
At some point in the 1990s, Mitchell turned down a part in the original production of Rent, the hit stage musical set amid the Aids crisis. “I had been cast as the Puerto Rican drag queen,” he says. “I was like, ‘Honey, there’s nothing Puerto Rican about me…’ So I demurred, but, you know, politely.” It seems even Mitchell draws the line somewhere when it comes to (in)authentic casting.
In 1996, he had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in Spike Lee’s Girl 6. “[Lee] was one of the great New York directors,” Mitchell says. “He didn’t want anyone to see the script. You only ever saw your scene, which I found a bit pretentious – as if it was some holy writ, which that script was not. But he loved actors.”
A few years later, Lee was attached to direct a film version of Rent and sought out Mitchell again – this time to play Mark, a main role. “I was very flattered. But I just never liked Rent. It probably spread a lot of love and tolerance, but what it was about – an East Village group of people making rock music – didn’t compute. The music, the clothes, the dialogue, is not what would be going on. And there was only one good song. So I said, ‘Thank you, Spike, but I just don't think it’s very good.’ I don’t think I was responsible, but he did drop out after that,” Mitchell adds. (Chris Columbus eventually replaced him as director.)
The 1990s would end with a moment of life-changing success for Mitchell, with the arrival of Hedwig. “Another ‘career suicide’ move,” he recalls. “People said, ‘Why would you want to do drag and punk when you have a very respectable acting career going on?’” For Mitchell, it was a question of, well, why wouldn’t he? “What’s unrespectable about these things?” he asks.
In the 24 years since its release, Hedwig’s reputation as a modern queer classic has only ossified – something that’s surprising, perhaps, given the film’s outrageous and messy take on gender and queerness. “I don’t know if it’s a trans story as much as a story of the patriarchy forcing itself upon you, and telling you what you are,” Mitchell admits. “Hedwig defines herself as the Berlin Wall between man and woman. I would argue that we’re all non-binary – a term that I find very temporary, because it’s a negative. I prefer ‘androgynous’. We all have male and female energies within us. And if we refuse to express them, it’s like a bird that’s died in your wall: it can stink the place up.”
There’s more motion outside the window, as a group of young school kids wearing hi-vis bibs ambles past. “Those jackets are so cute,” Mitchell says. “They’re almost like a chain gang. They should be forced to pick up litter. In the US, children have these ropes… it’s like The Human Centipede.”
After Hedwig and the sexually brazen Shortbus, two more films followed – 2010’s Rabbit Hole, a drama about grief starring an Oscar-nominated Nicole Kidman, and 2017’s How to Talk to Girls at Parties, an eminently British indie about aliens and punks in 1970s Sheffield. (Kidman has a supporting role there too, as a punk.)
“Nicole Kidman is a thoroughbred unicorn,” Mitchell says. “She’s stronger than all the others. She’s rare, she’s magical, she’s very white. And she’s fierce as hell. She is self-directing – when she’s on a roll, I might say, ‘Nicole, do you need me?’ which is my way of saying, ‘I have another idea,’ but I let her decide. She sometimes does things that are beneath her because she has to keep working. She’s a unicorn who must” – he throws his head back theatrically – “ride!”
Mitchell hasn’t directed a film since then (despite turning down further collaborations with Kidman, he remains keen to work with her again). He has, though, remained prolific. His scripted musical podcast Anthem: Homunculus (2019) was an outré work of autofiction, starring Glenn Close, Cynthia Erivo, and Patti LuPone, while this year’s Cancellation Island was an audio series featuring Holly Hunter, set in a rehab facility for people who have been “cancelled”. He’s also taught at the University of Michigan – bringing his late-20th-century punk sensibilities into direct conflict with the sexphobic Zoomer paradigm.
“Young people start to feel older, you know,” he says. “Sort of schoolmarmish, judgy… Maybe Maga kids are having sex in the States, I don’t know. I actually doubt it. Porn, internet culture, Covid, and social media have shut down sex for a lot of young people in the industrialised world. What I told them was: learn about punk and get laid.”
He cocks his eyebrow a final time. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, can you please just be young again?’ F*** up, do drugs, make mistakes. In a healthy way. Question authority – but not from behind a screen. Of course, there are people doing it. But there used to be a lot more.”
It’s a philosophy to live by, and Mitchell’s own life is proof of its virtues. “I was a bit afraid when I was young,” he adds. “It took me coming out, acting, doing Hedwig, to find my courage. And maybe it’s a matter of time for some of these kids, but, you know, as Mom says, ‘If you keep doing that – it’ll stick.’”
John Cameron Mitchell Live in London is at London’s Adelphi Theatre on 8 July. Tickets can be purchased here: https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/john-cameron-mitchell/
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