Although he lives in New York and his work has taken him all over the world, film, stage actor and singer Anthony Rapp often returns to his roots in Illinois, whether to watch his beloved Chicago Cubs continue an extraordinary season or to visit family outside of Joliet.
However, on Sept. 26, the star of the original Broadway production of Rent and a wide range of both mainstream and independent films was back in town for the world premiere of his new film Bwoy—chosen as the red-carpet centerpiece for the 34th annual Reeling Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival.
With award-winning filmmaker John G. Young serving as writer/director, the intimately filmed Bwoy centers around a sexually charged online relationship built between an upstate New York credit card phone bank employee Brad ( Rapp ) and a young Jamaican lad named Yenny ( Jimmy Brooks ).
Windy City Times: First of all, congratulations on a brilliantly done and very surprising film.
Anthony Rapp: Thank you. I haven't seen it yet. I feel pretty confident about it because it was so self-contained. Some films, when you are filming them, there's so much going on that you don't know how they're going to turn out. But the way [Bwoy] was shot was so simple, I felt very good about the work we were doing. Our cinematographer [Ryan Balas] would show me stills so I could see the look and feel of it. I feel good going in.
WCT: What attracted you to the script?
AR: I like the dark, interesting nooks and crannies of human behavior. Stories that explore grief in unique ways are very interesting to me because grief has been a big part of my life. I lost my mom when I was in my mid-twenties and Jonathan Larson who wrote Rent. Both of those things happened very quickly. Another friend of mine died right before then, too.
In the middle of all that, I didn't do anything like what happens in Bwoy but the darker undertow of grief, especially when it is unexpressed, I found to be really honest. I knew John a little bit and when he shared the script and asked me to do it. I like doing films that are small because everybody involved is that much more involved. I've done big-budget films and you become like a small cog in a big machine. In a film like this, it was literally just the actors; John, the cinematographer; and maybe two other people at any given time.
WCT: Brad comes across as so deeply isolated. Did having such a small crew help?
AR: I think so. It was so intimate and safe. The way that we shot the online conversations was that I was in front of the monitor and Jimmy was in another room on another monitor and we played the scene in real time. The fact that that there were only two or three other people in the room at the same time absolutely made a difference to make it feel that much more isolated and private.
That's the other thing about the film that really attracted me—finding ways to explore hidden, private experiences in a way that doesn't feel pornographic or sensationalistic. John is very clear about how he wants to shoot something. He had a really good sense of what he wanted to accomplish on any given day so it was never rushed. There was no pressure. You could breathe through all of it.
WCT: Off-camera, did you to try keep a deliberate separation between yourself and Jimmy?
AR: We did, and it was very helpful. We had a table reading together and then we didn't talk too much outside of that. We wanted to let our interaction happen through the screen. A film camera is like a lie-detector. It just picks up everything. If the two of us as human beings and as actors are discovering each other in real time, that can only help.
WCT: The cinematography reminded me of the German film Der Untergang ( Downfall )—very voyeuristic in the way that it places the viewer.
AR: The camera used was like a handheld, still camera. That's technology they have now. So it was very small and unobtrusive. It all felt very contained. It's appropriate that the audience is peering in on these intimate, private moments.
WCT: Bwoy's also not very genre-specific. First we are looking a romance and, the next thing you know, we are in thriller territory.
AR: That made emotional sense to me. With any kinds of shifts in tone, it is key if the behavior is recognizable in some way where people do extreme things but you can feel the connection to the soul that's driving them. There's a consistency of emotional truth.
WCT: How does it compare to the experience of theater?
AR: I prefer theater overall but, if more film experiences could be something like this, it would be a little closer because theatre is so much more collaborative and so much more on the actor's back to carry the moment on a nightly basis. The way that the scenes played in this film was like that; like doing a play. Not every film is like that. I like going to see a fun, entertaining blockbuster but I don't know if I want to do them because it is a lot of standing in front of a fake screen. A lot of times it is a just a big machine.
WCT: And character and storylines take a backseat role to CGI. What do you think is behind Hollywood's fear of real stories?
AR: It's this weird catch-22. If they invest more money in the film, they're going to invest more money in marketing to make it a success. If it's a small film, the studio system is not a great place for it because it's just going to get lost because they don't have enough at stake. So it's a weird, back-asswards way of doing it.
Back in the heyday of filmmaking in the '70s, studio films were being made intimately but the business wasn't set up in the same way so, if it was a smaller, mid-size budget film, they would still devote the resources to it. Today, it's as much as anything about economics and the fear of these huge corporations needing to have a profit. The place where the most interesting screen acting, wiring and directing is happening now is in television again. There's this huge renaissance so that, now, it's the kind of area where you can get into intimate story-telling with more vision, control and voice.
