Twenty years ago, Anthony Rapp played the role of Mark Cohen in the off-Broadway debut of the musical Rent, a cultural watershed that made the AIDS crisis resonate with a wider audience and, for many straight and queer people, offered the first glimpse at a loving, homosexual relationship. Rapp, now 44, has helped to sustain Rent‘s legacy, and not just by reprising his role onstage and onscreen in the 2005 film version—he’s performed numerous nuanced portrayals of homosexual characters throughout his career.
Anthony Rapp: I met John [the filmmaker] years ago—I think almost 25 years ago—around his first film Parallel Sons. I knew the actor who played the lead in it. But I hadn’t seen or talked to John in all those years since, and he reached out to me last spring, maybe even earlier than that. He wrote me an e-mail and said he had this script and he wanted to talk to me about it. And he sent me the script and I read it, and then we had a really good meeting. That’s actually one of the ways that I love for a project to come about: when [the filmmaker] is somebody I have some kind of relationship with—even if it’s a very small relationship—we have a good conversation, and we start on the same page. That kind of meeting is a very attractive way to begin a project for me, because collaboration is so important to me, and having a good relationship with the people I work with is very important. In bwoy, you play a man who deals with the death of his young son and the disintegration of his marriage in a seemingly unusual way. Though as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the online relationship is loaded for your character and actually makes a lot of sense for him. Was that part of the pull for you? Oh yeah. I’m very interested in the darker undertones of human behavior and experience, and I feel like the script really rang true for me. I’m interested in people who do things that are complicated and weird, and when people act out in ways that don’t necessarily make a lot of logical sense, but make emotional sense—that is very compelling to me. And it’s been a while, I feel, since we’ve had stories that have been complicated and interesting about the closet, living in the closet. And so it was interesting in that way too, because there are all kinds of ways that living in the closet has a cost—to the person himself or herself, and to the people in his or her life—and I feel like this film talks about that in a very interesting way.
You grew up in Joliet. You’re a Cubs fan. What, if anything, about being from the Chicagoland area informs your work?
Yeah, I think so. I think there’s something to that. And it’s funny, Chicago has the lake, and it’s major. I think if Chicago didn’t have the lake, it would feel very, very different.
