There is a main purpose why Ben Platt signed on to Prime Video’s “The Folks We Hate on the Marriage ceremony.” “I used to be actually hungry to play a queer character and, particularly, a homosexual character and to get to play one thing very near my very own expertise and my very own age and my very own demographic,” he tells POPSUGAR.
Within the new comedy, Platt performs Paul, the youngest sibling of three. He and his sister Alice, performed by Kristen Bell, are resentful they must journey throughout the pond for the marriage ceremony of their seemingly good half-sister Eloise (“The Rings of Energy”‘s Cynthia Addai-Robinson). Their mom, performed by Alison Janney, simply desires all of them to come back collectively, however Paul and Alice deliver their baggage with them — with main penalties. The film is predicated on the 2016 novel by Grant Ginder, with a screenplay from “Bob’s Burgers” writers Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin and Wendy Molyneux.
Platt first learn the script within the midst of the pandemic. “It was in the course of a time the place I feel all of us had been craving some pleasure and a few heat and one thing to flee into,” he explains. “And I discovered that studying the script actually felt that manner; it was a much-needed breath of contemporary air of one thing foolish and ridiculous and in addition heartfelt. And I additionally simply liked the character of Paul.”
Enjoying a homosexual character, he says, was “relieving.” “Once you’re enjoying characters who aren’t queer, there’s, like, an entire toolbox that it’s a must to hold a lid on as a queer actor,” he explains. “After we get to play queer characters, you could possibly burst it open and simply use all of these instincts, and that tone of humor, and the connections that we really feel to these relationships. And so I simply felt actually in my very own pores and skin getting to do this.”
Plus, he says, plenty of queer tales aren’t informed by queer actors, and he is grateful to struggle that pattern. “However past that, I feel there’s plenty of homosexual and queer tales which have plenty of trauma and despair hooked up to them, understandably so as a result of this neighborhood’s handled plenty of that through the years,” he provides. “It is so fantastic to see a queer story that the queerness shouldn’t be inherently the subject material. It is simply . . . a part of the narrative and the tapestry of the characters, and [it] simply occurs to be that one of many members of this household is a queer individual and his relationship is a queer relationship.” The film handles that relationship with “plenty of humor,” however the relationship itself is rarely the joke. He provides that director Claire Scanlon was actually good at listening to Platt and Karan Soni, who performs his boyfriend, so they might deliver “authenticity” to the connection but in addition humor whereas nonetheless ensuring everybody felt “tremendous protected” in the course of the extra risqué scenes.
The subject of the film — weddings — is fairly well timed for Platt, who simply turned 29, as effectively. “I am in that zone proper now the place all my associates are getting engaged and getting married,” he says. “And I am form of in that age group, notably as a result of I am a Jew.” He provides, “It makes you are feeling like an grownup in a very scary manner.” A few of his associates are on the brink of head down the aisle proper now, like his finest good friend, Beanie Feldstein.
“I am simply thrilled that that lots of people are discovering the lids to their pots,” he says. “I even have my accomplice, Noah, who I actually love,” he provides of boyfriend Noah Galvin. “Sometime we’ll most likely do this, too.”
“The Folks We Hate on the Marriage ceremony” streams Nov. 18 on Prime Video.
