Andrew Rannells contributed the cocaine. I mean, yes, as a star and producer on Showtime’s dark comedy about the 1987 Wall Street crash, Black Monday, he contributed much more than that. But he had considerable experience with the cocaine, and he brought that to the table.
In one of the most memorable moments from the actor’s six-season run on Girls as Elijah, gay BFF to Lena Dunham’s Hannah, the two characters hoover piles of the party drug and deliriously dance at a sweaty Williamsburg club. So when it came time for the actors on Black Monday to snort a powdery substance—and, to reiterate, this is a comedy series about Wall Street in 1987, so that occasion came early, and then often—Rannells asserted himself as the expert.
“I learned on Girls that what we snorted was Vitamin B powder, so I delivered that suggestion on set,” he says with mocked pride. “I do have a producer credit on the show, so I felt like I could speak up.”
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The cocaine is actually a pivotal plot point. (Again: Wall Street! The ’80s!) Rannells plays Blair, a naïve business school grad who marches onto the ruthless trading room floor armed with only a fancy algorithm, blissful ignorance, and a smile, a lamb in horn-rimmed glasses heading to slaughter. In this instance, death comes in the form of a bombastic trader named Mo (Don Cheadle) and a bag full of cocaine that detonates into a conspicuous cumulonimbus of dust when he and Blair collide. Blair’s Wall Street career is over before it even begins.
Through a tangle of plot twists, the interaction inextricably connects the two, and soon the unlikely pair are working together at Mo’s firm. Black Monday, which premieres Sunday night on Showtime, is Rannells’ first regular series role since Girls ended in 2017. For the actor, playing a newly engaged stock trader in a dark comedy set in the ’80s was a special opportunity.
“I got to see what I would look like in a pleated pant, I tell you what,” he says, laughing about the show’s period wardrobe. “My first costume fitting was like, I don’t know if I can do this. But then after a while you’re like, ‘I look good in a pleat! I’m really rocking these pleats.’”
But beyond the fashion, talking over coffee in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood the week before Black Monday premieres, Rannells is reflective about how the series folds into a broader conversation about this particular moment in his life.
When Girls ended, Rannells was “offered every gay best friend known to man.” Rather than sign on in a panic to just any TV show, he booked roles in two acclaimed Broadway productions—the musical Falsettos, for which he was nominated for a Tony, and the star-studded The Boys in the Band—and waited for Black Monday to materialize. For the first time, his comedic talents are on display in a leading on-screen role in which he isn’t playing a sassy gay guy.
In March, he will publish his first book, a collection of essays titled Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood, about his experience moving to New York from Omaha, Nebraska, and floundering as he tried to find his place in the theater community and come to terms with his own sexuality. This summer, he turned 40.
We last talked to Rannells when Girls was ending and he had just finished his run in Falsettos, which he said was “the first job I ever had where I felt like a man.” He says it’s been nice to do Black Monday and “feel like I was playing a man, playing a grown up.” Combined with the upcoming release of Too Much Is Not Enough, “I feel like I earned a lot to be happy about in the past couple of years,” he says. “It’s a nice way to walk into a new decade.”
It’s around the time Rannells is talking about finding out his father died while in the middle of having bad sex with a stranger that I realized he may be one of Hollywood’s most open books. (Just kidding, that realization came years ago when a particularly hilarious scene from Girls led us to have an extended conversation about delivering apathetic hand jobs.)
That’s the thing, though. While Rannells’ candor is certainly remarkable, it’s what he’s being candid about that’s actually unusual. Unheard of, really: He’s a gay celebrity who actually talks about having gay sex.
It shouldn’t be weird. There are more out gay celebrities than ever, and celebrities talk about their sex lives a lot. But… not the gay ones! At least not often, as Rannells learned following an appearance on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen this summer in which he told a story about the time he had sex with a cast mate in his dressing room during intermission when he was playing Link Larkin in Hairspray on Broadway.
“I got so much of a response about just that, that, yes, you can be gay but people don’t generally talk about gay sex,” he says. “It didn’t even really cross my mind that I was doing anything, not controversial, but unexpected. Like I hear straight people talking about sex all the time. So why shouldn’t I say, yes, I had sex with my boyfriend in the dressing room at intermission of Hairspray? I should be able to say that. So I did.”
The conversation comes up because, in Too Much Is Not Enough, Andrew Rannells writes about gay sex. It was important to him to do so. In fact, the book’s existence is owed to it.
His agent, Bill Clegg, had written a memoir called Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, and, based on their email correspondence, felt that Rannells had a memoir in him, too. Rannells had always liked writing—at one point, he had a screenwriting deal with Judd Apatow to pen a gay romantic comedy—but this would be a different beast.
He sent him a few sample essays, one of which Clegg submitted to The New York Times’ “Modern Love” section. “During a Night of Casual Sex, Urgent Messages Go Unanswered” was published in July 2017, chronicling how, during a bad second date in his early twenties with a guy whose first name was Brad and whose last name he doesn’t remember, he learned his father was dying.
“I was in the middle of having really half-hearted sex with a stranger when all these phone calls started coming in about my dad being in the hospital,” he says. “I was ignoring the phone calls, and then when I finally listened to them, this guy was still in my apartment. Then I had to deal with the news that my father was dying and get rid of this guy, who I didn’t really even like.”
The column was proof-of-concept for Random House, which will publish Too Much Is Not Enough in March.
The book of essays talks about the seven years between moving to New York and when he started working on Broadway. He was 27 when he was cast as a replacement in Hairspray, moving on to Jersey Boys before landing his biggest break as Elder Price in The Book of Mormon when he was 32. Waiting that long to become a star was not part of a 17-year-old, wide-eyed Omaha native’s plan. The journey there was long and messy, and he thinks young Broadway fans should know that.
“I moved here in ’97 with this expectation that I kind of knew what New York was going to be and how I was going to tackle it,” he says. “A lot of it came from this idea of movies and TV shows, and you know that’s not how New York really works. The essays that I wrote are about the nonsense that you get involved in as a young person in New York: getting distracted and getting discouraged and then getting encouraged and all the ups and downs you go through while you’re trying to figure out how you fit into this.”
Talking about one’s early twenties in New York naturally, then, means talking about sex. In one essay, for example, he recounts the less-than-desirable story of how he lost his virginity.
“I certainly did not lose my virginity in the most traditional of ways,” Rannells says. “As a gay kid, particularly as a gay kid in the ’90s, I didn’t have a normal outlet for that. I didn’t have a cute teenage boyfriend who I was in love with. I had a community theater director who was much, much older and I thought was my best option. I felt like I was making the right decision at the time, but I was 17 years old and wasn’t equipped to think about how it was going to affect me long term.”
The book isn’t supposed to be a teaching tool in any sort of way, he continues, “But I feel like there are gay kids who feel like they don’t have a normal path to a healthy sex life. Mine certainly started off rocky. I know who those kids at the stage door are and a lot of them are gay. I can at least share part of my experience, which is you do have better options and you don’t have be trapped into doing something. I wish somebody had told me that when I was 17.”
Too Much Is Not Enough is a change of pace from the typical celebrity memoir in that, because it’s set before he hit it big, there are no dishy stories about famous people to spelunk through the pages to find. (His time living with Lena Dunham in Los Angeles is a tale for another time.) Instead, the surprises come from learning that there’s more to Rannells than you may have assumed.
When he first started gaining notice for Book of Mormon, interviewers tended to describe him the same way. “A lot of Ken doll comparisons,” he laughs. “By the way, I liked that. It’s very flattering. Great, a Ken doll!”
For the record, Ken has aged quite well, his broad shoulders exquisitely filling out a fitted black blazer over a charcoal sweater while we drink coffee. It’s an appearance he has figured out how to use to his comedic advantage.
There’s a scene in Sunday night’s Black Monday premiere in which Rannells’ Blair drops all gee-golly artifice and blows a gasket, warning people not to mess with him because his father died of a heart attack while beating him, he grew up poor, and is scrappy. It’s extremely gratifying to watch, especially because it is Rannells performing it.
“There’s the assumption that people in the Midwest are this squeaky clean, very naive folk, but the reality is that there can be a much darker side to living in the middle of the country,” he says. “I’ve always had that in me, but I think people assume that’s not who I would be. They just think I’m going to be a chipper, cheerful guy all the time.”
He went through a major breakup about two years ago, which was happening while he was doing, of all shows, Falsettos, in which his character goes through a breakup in the first act and is diagnosed with AIDS in the second. Crying on stage every night, he says, was very therapeutic.
The experience of working on The Boys in the Band next, which he starred in last summer alongside Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, and a cast of all out gay actors, surprised him. The director was gay. The playwright was gay. The entire cast was gay. The producer, Ryan Murphy, was gay.
“There was a shorthand we all had with each other,” he says. “There were things that didn’t have to be explained, or things that were never assumed that I think a lot of times, I’m speaking very generally here, working with straight people you have to explain about being gay.” Chatting about his breakup with that vernacular was helpful.
Much of the cast was already friends from the business, but had never had the chance to work together before—and, truthfully, probably won’t again soon. “There’s this sort of unspoken rule in Hollywood that you can’t have two gays play opposite each other. It has to be a straight guy and a gay guy,” he says. “Very rarely do you see two gays together.”
He remembers when he was cast in The New Normal on NBC, a groundbreaking, though ultimately short-lived, sitcom from Ryan Murphy in which he co-starred with Justin Bartha, who is straight, as gay parents adopting their first child. Rannells was cast first, and there was another actor who was being tested for Bartha’s role, but who was also gay. “I can’t tell you that his sexuality didn’t come into play when it came time to make the final decision,” he says.
As we get ready to say our goodbyes—Rannells has to run to Armani to be fitted for a suit for his Black Monday premiere; rough life—he talks generally about what he hopes comes next, as odd as it is to consider the question when two major projects are about to be birthed. He’d like to try writing screenplays again. And he’d like to keep up his track record of doing a Broadway production a year, but hasn’t booked anything yet.
There are more immediate plans to tend to, though. He just booked his trip for the unofficial gay pilgrimage of 2019: tickets to see Patti LuPone in the West End production of Company. After doing a scene with the acting legend on Girls, he’s managed to “force a friendship” and was able to text her and get house seats.
“My little 13-year-old brain was exploding as I was texting with her, and she said, ‘Well honey, do you need a place to stay while you’re here? You can stay with me,’” he says. “My little head really almost exploded.”
In the end, he opted for a hotel with friends. This is one case that really would have been too much.
