After a Historic Year on Broadway, Jeremy Pope Heads to Hollywood
Growing up in Orlando, Florida, Jeremy Pope was told that if he wanted to become a performer, Disney World was the place to do it. Instead, he followed his 17-year-old gut to New York City and joined the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Pope eventually booked the lead in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play Choir Boy, a role that the actor, now 27, revisited when the production moved to Broadway in 2018. Two Tony nominations later, he will appear as an aspiring screenwriter in Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, a 1940s-set show-business fantasia for Netflix. “One of the concerns I shared with Ryan was that we’re telling the story of these people trying to make something of themselves in Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s,” Pope says. “But as a black man, I couldn’t have existed back then the way I do now. I wanted to make sure that we were protecting that, and that if we were going to tell that story, that there were people in the writers’ room, that there were directors, and that there were people around me who reflected that. He assured me this would be the case, and it helped me trust him.”
This article appears in the Spring 2020 issue of Interview Magazine. Subscribe here.
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Grooming: Zaheer Sukhnandan
Photography Assistant: Adrian Hurtado
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