Morning People is a new column from CULTURED in which you’ll hear from some of the most interesting minds in the culture. I’ll be having breakfast with a different person each month for a free-flowing discussion about what’s inspiring them, what keeps them up at night, and what they’re making of the world, the arts, and the industries around them. We’ll also, of course, find out their breakfast order. We kick things off with celebrated writer and commentator Jeremy O. Harris.
Jeremy O. Harris slides into the seat across from me at the Lower East Side’s Corner Bar, clad in a bright orange shirt and knit hat. We’d pushed our breakfast a few days as he had to spend a bit more time in Los Angeles, where he just wrapped a production of Beethoven’s Egmont with the LA Phil, in collaboration with Cate Blanchett and Gustavo Dudamel. (A nearby patron interrupts us when he hears Harris mention Dudamel; after Harris tells him he actually just worked with the famed composer, as well as Blanchett, the man laughs and quips, “Holy cow, I’m just a member of the public.”)
Harris—gregarious, sharp, ebullient—is the dream meal companion. He’s blunt and honest, but there’s a notable warmth undergirding nearly all his observations. Equally at ease discussing TikTok dances as he is the fraught national political moment, Harris reminds me at times of a millennial Fran Lebowitz. We don’t have all that many fearless public cultural commentators; this thought occurred to me again when I read about Harris confronting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, a few days after our meet-up.
At Corner Bar, Harris orders an iced Americano and chicken soup—it’s, uh, a very late breakfast—while we both go for the green salad with chicken. The writer—whose 2018 Slave Play received 12 Tony nominations—is, as ever, incredibly busy. His latest onscreen appearance, in Pete Ohs’s drama Erupcja, which he co-wrote and co-produced with Charli XCX, who also stars, is out on April. He’s also writing his first nonfiction project, based on the three weeks he spent in custody in Japan in November, after he was arrested on suspicion of bringing MDMA into the country. Below, he sounds off on that experience, Letterboxd grades, and brokewave cinema.
I have a friend who thinks you can get yourself out of a hangover if you just mentally decide, “I’m going to go about my day and do my thing.”
I was with Charli XCX and Rostam [Batmanglij] this weekend, and Rostam apparently has a hangover method. He doesn’t drink anymore, but Charli still uses it. You go into the shower immediately and shower until you feel better. When you get out, you’re fine.
I can kind of see that.
I feel like being sedentary is the thing that makes a hangover worse… It’s the drinking water issue for me, though. I’m like, I’m so thirsty. I’ve obviously poisoned myself, I need water, then I refuse to drink water because I don’t want to get out of bed.
Yeah, I have a few friends who are doing—
Ozempic?
Well, yes. But I was going to say Dry January, or Dry February.
I had a month where I wasn’t drinking, and that was really great. As someone who doesn’t like to work out—and also at an age where all of my great clothes will fit tighter if I don’t, like, do something—having the cheat code of still having a stronger metabolism than most of my peers and being like, “Oh, I’m just not going to drink for this month”… makes it so I don’t really have to work out like everyone else is working out.
I’d rather not drink for a month than work out every day for a month.
Yeah. Because also, all the people I know who have the sickest bodies at our age, either they have a mental disorder that makes them want to work out all the time, or they’re on five different shots. I don’t want to do either of those things. I went to dinner with a guy who, if I say his name, everyone will be like, “Oh wow.” But he’s one of those guys who very recently got really sick abs. He’s very publicly going on an ab journey on the Instagram. We were having dinner at an Italian restaurant, and we’re sharing all the apps with four people, and I’m like, “Oh and we’ll get each of the pastas to split.” He was like, “Oh God, no, you guys still eat carbs?” He had just decided to never eat a carb again. I was like, “Oh, babe.”
So how was the Cate experience? I can’t believe you were working on a classical music piece with Lydia Tár!
Oh my God. It was amazing. It was a sort of weird homosexual cosplay where every gay man in my life was like, “Oh my God.” She told me that part of the way she did the conducting [in Tar], and I think she said this on the awards campaign for that film, was like, “I don’t know how to conduct, but I know how to dance.” Every day she was just the most convivial, kind, and inquisitive person. We did one performance in Palm Springs; Rostam and I were staying in this cute little house next to the theater. After the performance, she was about to take her car straight to the city, and I was like, “Do you want to come by and have pizza at my house?” So she came over and ate pizza, drank wine, and I guess I can say she was watching me have a cigarette.
She seems like you could literally just spend five hours in deep convo with her.
She’s so cool. A real theater historian. She knows about so many amazing pieces that have happened in the last 70 years and will just draw them from the air in the middle of a conversation. Finding a theater beast like that is a rarity, and it was so exhilarating to talk to her about the necessity of theater and why she wants to do a show a year. It led to this sort of charge I’ve given myself; I was like, I have to write something else for Cate Blanchett.
Your career is so interesting to me because you are just constantly doing these things that seem so exciting and cool, but also they’re all in different mediums and forms. How do you decide if something’s worth your time or energy?
I’m truly looking for a way to have fun. That’s why I sometimes feel sort of trapped by the title of “writer,” because I sort of accidentally became a writer. I started writing because that was more fun than acting. Now sometimes producing feels more fun than writing, and making music feels more fun than producing sometimes, and working with musicians and collaborating in this way feels more fun than doing all that sometimes. And yes, there are some financial realities that make certain decisions specific, right? I have a family to take care of in Virginia; I have a fiancé and a life that we have here together in New York. I don’t want to put that in danger in the pursuit of fun. I’m not a child. But some balance between real fun that replenishes and whatever that version of commercial work is, feels like the Jeremy route. But also I’m always looking for things that are daring and surprising even in commercial work. I’m working on something right now that I think if everyone knew what it was, they’d be like, “Wait, what the fuck?” But the reason I’m writing this movie is because I’m doing it my way. I also want to give a major studio the opportunity to see me as a good boy that can show up and do work on time.
How was the experience of working with Charli on Erupcja?
It was really cool to see these two artists that I really, really respect, Charli and Pete [Ohs], come together in their first reading and put their heads together and say, “Fuck yes, we’re going to do this.” This was the first film she ever did, and the way she jumped into it with balls to the wall. I mean, she’d been taking acting classes and things like that on the side, but she had no fear, which was really cool. And she was about to start a tour. She was finishing the [Brat] remix album. The second day we were on set, I think, was the day that Obama put “360” on his list of best songs. What’s also really fun about this movie is we are allowed and afforded a lot more risk because the movie isn’t a movie where we’re like, “Oh my God, this movie costs $50 million. We need to make all our money back.”
It’s all upside.
No matter what we do, we’re winning, right? Part of the great thing about the way Pete makes a movie, and why I was really excited that Charli decided to say yes to it, is that these are “teaching hospital” movies in a sense. We’re all vibrant, young, dynamic storytellers who are at a real crossroads in our industry. Someone jokingly called what Pete is doing “brokewave cinema” because the system’s broke and the movies are made by people who are broke. None of us are billionaires; we’re not Jason Blum yet. When things are broken, you do have to figure out a new way out of it.
One of the things that really makes me and Pete sad is seeing legions of our great storytellers waste their years, waiting with the one script they wrote for Timothée Chalamet to attach maybe, and then maybe get A24 or Neon or, God willing, Warner Brothers to say yes and green light it at the budget that they want. When you look back at the 1970s, all these vibrant, dynamic people were just picking up cameras and doing things, and studios were also just saying yes. Right now is the most accessible film has ever been, so let’s utilize that as much as we can.
We’ve become too precious. We’re so afraid of failure. I see someone like [French filmmaker] Quentin Dupieux or [South Korean director] Hong Sang-soo, they have one to two movies out every year. There needs to be more of a culture of that and less of a culture of people being like, “But what’s Letterboxd going to give me as a grade?” It’s like, who the fuck cares? With Wuthering Heights, what the hell was that Letterboxd grade? Is it stopping Margot [Robbie] or Jacob [Elordi] or Emerald [Fennell] from making another movie? Absolutely not. I don’t think it should stop anyone. You can’t live and breathe, live and die, off what a critic’s going to say about your movie.
You have new plays in the works?
[Spirit of the People, with Amber Heard] is happening. I wrote a play a couple years ago that I still really want to see happen called A Boy’s Company. It’s my weird Jacobean revenge fantasy. I’m a Taurus moon, so I’m very stubborn. There are a lot of things that I think are built wrong right now, and I don’t want to bend to their bad architecture. With most of my plays right now, if I were less excited about working with the collaborators I’m working with, and were just able to throw them aside and say, like, “Everyone in my play about gay guys at the beach is going to be played by the cast of Heated Rivalry,” I could have these plays up in New York in a minute. I’m not interested in that. I’m more interested in following my first impulses and staying true to the people who shaped this work. So the path to those plays happening in New York is more circuitous right now. But I’m excited about the circuit we’re about to take.
I think it’s really sad that in a landscape where… I mean, my fiancé works in television, I work in television and film. Two months ago, it was like, “If you don’t get these people, it’s not going to happen.” Then two months later, it’s different people. [Now], if it’s not Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, it’s not happening. If it’s not Sarah Pidgeon, it’s not happening. I’m like, “Where was Sarah Pidgeon on this list last time? Because I think I mentioned her and you guys were like, ‘No.’” It’s like, “You do know that the people from Heated Rivalry, Sarah Pidgeon, came from people taking a chance.”
You want to find the next Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.
I’m more interested in being the person that finds them. I got six Tony nominations for my first cast for Slave Play. That’s the kind of shit I want to do.
I’m curious to hear about the Japan experience and how you’re feeling.
I feel fine. I’m excited for people to read what I’ve written about it. I think that the minute people read the headline, a lot of people imagined that I was in Brokedown Palace, the ’90s movie everyone watched where Claire Danes is in Thailand. I was never fearing for my life. I feel like it’s a disappointment to even talk about it in an interview because it’s so mundane. It was an “out of time” moment in a moment where I needed to step out of time. So I look at that moment in my life with a lot of excitement and generosity. If anything, I was sad that there were people in my life that couldn’t get in contact with me.
Were you surprised how much press it got?
It was silly. It was also silly that there was more [press] about me getting arrested than me getting out, but that’s fine.
What’s exciting to you right now culturally?
I’m always excited by [manga series] Jujutsu Kaisen. There was a writer I read in jail that I really liked, Suzumi Suzuki. She wrote a book called Gifted. I really like The Secret Agent a lot. The way in which it feels like a novel is really stunning and something I would really aspire to make… Oh, the other thing I’m really into right now is “White Feather Tail Hawk Deer Hunter,” the new Lana [del Rey] song. It’s probably the best written song of the last five years.
What’s your biggest turn-off and turn-on in a person? Not romantically, necessarily.
In general, and this is romantically as well, intellect is my biggest turn-on. I love someone who’s really smart. I’d love to say a lack of it is my turnoff, but I actually think my biggest turnoff is bad politics. Being obstinate about your bad politics will really piss me off. A guy tried to hook up with me last week while saying some of the craziest shit I’ve ever heard. I was like, “Oh, so you’re a fascist.”
This might be connected to politics, too. What’s anxiety-inducing to you right now?
The fact that we have fascists in office and everyone just sort of has to live day-by-day because none of the people who are supposed to be the opposition party are providing any real opposition. They’re just sort of being like, “It’s really sad right, guys? We should be upset.” I’m like, “No, you literally can do something.” The fact that we’re not having people on the Senate and House floor being like, “We will not leave until you stop…”
Last question, would you consider yourself to be a “morning person”?
Only in the sense that the morning is often when I go to bed.
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