Oh, he is such a good man. It’s really cool for me, as a newcomer in the acting world, to be around people like Hugh Jackman, where you’re like, Oh, this man is a massive, massive, massive star, but also first person to set, last person to leave, says hi to every single person. His decorum and the care that he shows for other people was just really impactful. There’s one part where he’s singing, and in the scene, I’m watching him sing, and it’s this kind of tragic scene of a daughter watching a father crumble, and the camera was on me, and he was just singing for me so that I could react to it. It was a very special experience.
Do you have plans to act more in the future?
Definitely. I love acting. In the same way that we were talking about expression and dress-up and playing with gender, I feel like acting and music are kind of symbiotic. Acting is such an exercise in using your body, figuring out what’s working, figuring out what’s not, trying things, not being afraid to try things, taking notes, playing off other people, learning from other people. It’s exactly the type of artistic medium that I enjoy. It’s communal, but it’s also internal. I just want to see how far I can push myself.
How did you prepare for your role in Song Sung Blue?
A great tip that I got was to keep a notebook and write out subtext, write out things about your character, write in the voice of your character. So really it’s becomes this creative writing exercise, which is like songwriting. So that, to me, was like, that clicks.
Okay, I have a Christine Baranski question, but it’s not “Are you dating?”
Amazing.
Why do you think lesbian age-gap relationships have such a hold on us as a queer community?
I was actually talking to [Baranski] about this. First of all, people are just looking for any sort of good news in very dark media cycle that we’re living in—I mean, come on, this week alone is such a crazy true-crime disaster—so that’s one thing. But then there’s also this other phenomenon that I’m really interested in: In so many of the stories of lesbians throughout history that we love, there is something working against them, like the government or the world at large and the culture. There’s usually an age gap in these stories, where there’s an older woman and a younger woman. There’s also usually a kind of secrecy element to it. There’s usually, like, a husband. I think that we’re kind of programmed to love these lesbian archetypes. I don’t know if maybe I’m going too meta-lesbian theory…
