I had a feeling Ryan Murphy might be the sort of person who detests lateness. Those who are routinely described as having their “finger on the pulse” or being “one step ahead” of everyone usually do. So, one evening in July, when I arrive at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. for our dinner fifteen minutes early and can see from across the restaurant that he is already at his table, looking rather settled in—indeed, halfway through his customary vodka martini—I realize that there’s going to be no outsmarting this fox, no beating Mr. Murphy to the punch, as it were. He will always get there first. (Sure enough, a week later he calls me 20 minutes before our scheduled phone conversation, once again making me feel flustered, even though I had been ready ahead of time.)
I sit down at his table and a waitress appears instantly. “I’m starving,” says Murphy, impeccably dramatic. “Do you want to order?” Without waiting for a response, he says, “Spaghetti Bolognese. We’ll have two of those.” He looks down at the menu and then up at me. “Let’s split two appetizers. The artichoke is brilliant.” Back to the waitress. “One artichoke.” To me: “I love the charcuterie plate.” To the waitress: “Great.”
It is a breathtaking display of control and impatience, but it is also somehow disarmingly sweet—as if he wanted to dispense with banal decision-making so that I would not have to be bothered. As Lea Michele, the biggest and brightest star in the Glee firmament, tells me, “I’ve slept over at his house, and he’s made me cereal in the morning, and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe Ryan Murphy is pouring the milk on my cereal!’ ” When I tell her how he ordered for me, she says, “Yes!” and then nails his droll cadence: “ ‘I’ll order. Don’t worry. We’ll have the artichoke.’ ”
A few moments later, the food arrives, and I joke aloud that only an evil genius could intuit the tastes of a stranger so precisely. He throws his head back and lets out a “Ha!” and then smiles. “I fundamentally knew exactly what you would like.”
Fundamentally knowing exactly what I—and millions of others—will like is why Murphy is something of a pop savant, or, as 20th Century Fox Television chairman Dana Walden puts it, “as significant a television creator as there is in our business today. He’s demonstrated an extraordinary number of times the ability to create these provocative worlds that break through the clutter of our business right now.”
After working as a journalist for The Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times for ten years, Murphy sold a script to Steven Spielberg and then broke into television in 1999 with the teen satire Popular, which aired on the WB for two seasons. But he really found his métier in 2003 with the dark/funny plastic-surgery send-up Nip/Tuck, which quickly became one of the highest-rated adult cable-television series in history. The show displayed Murphy’s uncanny timing, coupled with a knack for being at once inflammatory and wildly popular. (“I am the male Lady Gaga,” he says at one point. “Please write that.”) In May of 2009, a year before Nip/Tuck wrapped its final season, Murphy (along with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan) gave birth to Glee and exploded so much dogma about American teenagers and pop culture that it’s hard to remember what the world looked (and sounded) like before Sue Sylvester and Journey mash-ups.
“Glee has really revolutionized the culture of our kids in this country,” says Gwyneth Paltrow, who gamely clowned around as the substitute teacher Holly Holliday for a few episodes, singing, saying shocking things, and becoming a Murphyized lovable fuck-up (while adding an Emmy to her Oscar). “He’s made music cool, he’s made singing cool, he’s made glee club cool, he’s made boys dancing cool. You know, it’s very powerful. It’s not a joke.” (Paltrow can also attest to the show’s astonishing reach: “Honestly, for a while there it was as if I had never done anything else. At cookbook signings people would say, ‘Can you sign it from Holly Holliday?’ Eleven-year-olds were screaming at me on the street. They had no idea who I was. It was just crazy.”)
The show was nominated for a record nineteen Emmys in its first season. “I pitched Glee as American Idol with a script,” says Murphy, “because it’s the same energy: You’re talented. Nobody believes in you. We are going to lift you up and show the world how amazing you are. I always think with my work, but especially with Glee, This is a great idea. Why has no one done it yet?”
Brad Falchuk, a cocreator and executive producer of Glee and also of Murphy’s modern-day gothic, American Horror Story (which was nominated for seventeen Emmys for its first season just a week before I met Murphy), has worked with him since he was hired as a writer on Nip/Tuck. The two men are “like brothers—we either hate each other or love each other,” Falchuk says. “Ryan seems to have a Spidey sense of what’s about to be important culturally. He just gets a feeling about it, and then he will keep charging forward until it’s done. You need that because if you are seeing the future in a way that other people can’t see yet, you need to be relentless because everyone around you is going to say, ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ And he’s incredibly compelling and charismatic, so he’s very good at convincing people that the sky is purple.”
With his first half-hour sitcom, The New Normal, Murphy will have three scripted television shows on the air on three separate networks all at once (now sometimes he’s late). That is an impressive, even superhuman, feat unto itself. (“He’s the only person I know who can do it,” says Falchuk. “He’s able to keep so many characters in his head and come in every day with story ideas and fixes for each show as if it were the only show. It’s like a great parent, where each kid feels loved.”) What’s trickier, though, is that while Murphy is used to a brouhaha—he has pushed boundaries before—The New Normal, while not the first sitcom to have two gay male lead characters, is the first show centered on two gay male lead characters in a loving relationship who kiss and snuggle in bed. And who are having a baby with a surrogate. It has already inspired howls of outrage and full-on protests from certain corners of America (e.g., the One Million Moms boycott, which Murphy was forced to address during a panel two days before I met him. “Ellen Barkin [’s character] is a member of the Moms! . . . I think their points of view are delivered with sensitivity and a certain amount of veracity by Ms. Barkin. So I think . . . if they watched it . . . they would like it”).
The conservative fire-breather that is Barkin’s character is loosely based on Murphy’s grandmother Myrtle, who died in 2002, when she was 83. Murphy has described her as a woman who would have a couple of glasses of wine and then say “jaw-dropping things” at the dinner table. But he adored her anyway. He was born and raised in Indianapolis in a suburban housing development. His father was a newspaper circulation director. “My backyard was literally a cornfield and a church. I was the first child of a beauty queen who wanted to be an actress, and she had me very young. My mother went back to work very quickly, and so my grandmother raised me. And she was a horror-movie aficionado who made me watch Dark Shadows at 4:00 p.m. and would yell at me for being afraid. ‘What’s wrong with you? This is playacting!’ And at a very early age she said to me, ‘Don’t be ordinary, because that’s boring. I wish I had not made the mistake of being conventional. You’re different.’ ” When Murphy moped around, feeling dejected because he was different—watching Barbra Streisand movies while his younger brother played “army” with other boys—it was Myrtle who would say, “Oh, don’t be that person!”
Murphy admits that “all of my stuff has been autobiographical,” just not explicitly so. Like Kurt on Glee, he came out when he was fifteen while attending high school in the Midwest. In Murphy’s case, it happened after his parents found out he was “having an affair” with a 21-year-old man. “We would wash his Corvette, go fishing, and listen to Christopher Cross on eight-tracks,” he says, conjuring an entire world in fourteen words. Murphy’s parents pulled him out of summer camp, sold his car, and threatened the boyfriend with statutory rape. And then they sent their son to a therapist with the goal of deprogramming his homosexuality. “Luckily,” says Murphy, “I had a brilliant therapist who after two sessions called my parents in and said, ‘Your child is very smart and manipulative, and clearly he’s getting A-pluses in school even though this is going on, so you either deal with it honestly or he will turn eighteen and you will never see him again.’ There was a long silent car ride home, and we never spoke of it again.” Until, that is, 2006, when he directed the film Running with Scissors (based on Augusten Burroughs’s memoir about his young troubled gay life) and “they wanted to talk about how badly they felt about how they had handled it.” All of this sounds like an episode of Glee—minus the part about the resolution coming a quarter-century later. In television, the loving parents generally arrive for the Big Talk before the credits roll.
But now, with The New Normal, Murphy is mining his adult life for material. Or perhaps mirroring is the more apt word. Murphy is married to David Miller; the couple live in L.A. and are “exploring surrogacy.” In the pilot episode, the fictional David (played by Justin Bartha) and his partner, Bryan (played by Andrew Rannells of Book of Mormon fame), live in L.A. and explore surrogacy. The woman they eventually choose is a naïf from the Midwest (played by Georgia King), whose horrified grandmother is played by Barkin. “Andrew’s character is clearly me,” says Murphy at dinner. “Ali Adler, who is the cocreator, is very good at writing me, which is interesting to read. I’m like, ‘Really? I say that?’ It’s a mind trip.”
“I play an idea of him,” says Rannells. “I’m not doing an impression or anything.” But after they met last October, Rannells “realized we had very similar senses of humor and weirdly, also, a similar way of speaking. So Ali would write certain lines that flow very naturally from my mouth, and usually they are the driest, sometimes meanest things. It’s just so much fun to get to say those things, particularly to very unsuspecting people . . . like children or old people!” He laughs. “I love it!”
Because Murphy himself is not a liberal moralist, his show is more politically nuanced than one might at first imagine, especially given the personal nature of the subject material. “He’s literally color-blind, gender-blind, homosexual-blind,” says Adler, a lesbian with two children. “So The New Normal is not so much a grand gesture of ‘We’re going to teach the country a lesson’ as ‘This is something you should already know.’ It’s like the alphabet. Everyone should be able to read.”
This is why Murphy sees Barkin’s character as the Archie Bunker in the mix, the lovable curmudgeon who pushes back against all these cockamamie liberals and their newfangled lifestyle choices. “If I was really satirizing Ellen Barkin’s character or hating on her,” he says, “it would be different, but it’s very clear that I have great affection for her. Because she’s my grandmother, too. Barkin’s character is a Mitt Romney supporter, doesn’t like gays, but herself was married to a gay man. It’s like what I said about the Million Moms: Watch the show! I get that you feel marginalized and on the outside too! We have more in common than you think!” He takes a sip of his drink and, as he so often does, gets a conspiratorial glint in his eyes. “I’m obsessed with Ann Romney. Aren’t you?” And then his tone shifts. “But I oddly admire her, with her brood of children. I don’t vilify her at all.”
There is a scene in the pilot of The New Normal that Murphy is particularly proud of, one in which David and Bryan are kissing in bed. “Of course we tested it with an audience in Burbank,” he says, “and it was the lowest-testing scene in the pilot. Everybody was like, ‘You are going to have to cut that scene if you want to get picked up.’ But then NBC said, ‘Do not touch it. We love it. It’s important.’ And I thought, Wow, it’s a different world than when I was fifteen, watching Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares.”
Oddly enough, it’s Murphy’s very successes that have inspired the networks to be more progressive. Dana Walden, who greenlighted Modern Family and Glee, says, “The New Normal speaks volumes for (a) what Ryan’s contribution has been to gay characters being portrayed on television and (b) where the state of my business is, which is that Ryan’s pitch—two gay men and their desire and struggle to have a family—creates a prime-time network-television bidding war, is given one of NBC’s best time periods, and is being supported at the highest level.”
There’s also another way to look at it. “I’m reading this book right now called Eminent Outlaws,” says Rannells, “about the history of gay writers, and I keep thinking of Ryan. A lot of gay playwrights in the fifties and sixties had to hide the homosexual story line within other stories to get their points across. It’s an exciting part of that evolution to then see that Ryan gets to now tackle these stories head-on, but in a half-hour sitcom, because he’s using the format to the fullest.”
Though Murphy clearly has a political side, and for example recently held an Obama fund-raiser at his home in Beverly Hills, he’s a showman above all. Even the way he talks about politics is through the medium of television. “I am writing an upcoming episode of The New Normal about the election,” he says, “and there’s a dinner party where Ellen Barkin and the gay guys are having a very heated discussion about Romney vs. Obama. And I remember an All in the Family episode about Nixon. So it’s my homage. But some of the things that my characters say are very inflammatory, and I think the network let me get away with it because. . . .” He stares away for a second. “You know, I don’t know why, but they did!”
Ryan Murphy has a funny reputation in Hollywood. Some of it clearly has to do with jealousy over his astonishing rise—about which he can sometimes seem smug—and some of it has to do with the fact that he has to, as he puts it, “pop a kid” every week on the reality show The Glee Project, which he does with near-Machiavellian chilliness. Even he admits he can sometimes come across as “snarky.” Although, as he points out, it has always been thus: “The truth of the matter is that even in high school, I was popular but also equally disliked for being different and having a different point of view. I feel it every day of my life.” He sighs. “Two days ago, I went to do the Television Critics Association event for The New Normal, and I was talking about my reverence for Norman Lear and, you know, the critics are in the audience—and for the most part they have been really kind to me—but there were a couple of them who were tweeting about my ankles because I was wearing a Thom Browne suit. So nothing has changed. How you are at five is how you are at 45. Whenever you do something that pushes the boundaries of anything, you get huge amounts of love and huge amounts of hate. The key is to ignore all of it.”
The folks who know Murphy best feel he gets a bad rap. “He likes to be in control,” says Paltrow. “And I can see how that would be maddening, but it’s really just a quest for quality—and to change the game a little bit.” Adler feels that he’s just one of those people who stir up feelings of inadequacy in others. “I was definitely intimidated by him upon the first and probably fortieth interaction,” she says. “But that was my own thing: He’s very successful, he’s very well dressed. Are you intimidated by the head cheerleader in high school? Well, that’s your choice, because the head cheerleader in high school is vomiting up her food and cutting herself. You just have to assume that everyone has insecurities.” For Falchuk, it’s more complex: “He has a very big, challenging personality, and that freaks people out. You’ve got to get used to him. Because he can be unforgiving and he can personalize stuff, but he’s probably the most loyal person I’ve ever met. I think a lot of people think he should be more humble. Why? That’s not who he is. Part of what makes him great is that he’s larger than life. You want to embrace characters like that. They’re wonderful. They make life interesting.”
As our dinner is winding down, Murphy, forever the reporter, turns his laser beams on me and fires away with one question after another: Who’s your favorite movie star? How long have you and your boyfriend been together? Did you hear what Elton John said about Madonna? At one point, he whips out his cell phone to show me pictures from the day two weeks ago that he and Miller, a photographer, got married in Provincetown. By all accounts, his partner of two years has grounded Murphy. “Since being with David, Ryan has just opened his heart up to love so much,” says Lea Michele. “In the past few months, I have seen such a joy and excitement in Ryan. And I just know that deep down they are going to be the most incredible parents. I am incredibly jealous that I am not their daughter. Because the Murphy household would be my dream.”
One of the things that Miller and Murphy had in common is that they both always knew they wanted children. “And we both had really difficult, tumultuous upbringings, and it’s . . . not a way to heal that . . . but definitely a way to explore it,” Murphy says. “Also, I thought if I don’t do this . . . I’m 46 . . . I will really, really regret it.” People who know Murphy point out that he is very particular about his surroundings. How will he handle the messiness of having a baby? “I worry about that! I have really bad OCD. My thing, since I was a child, is that I can have chaos within control. So if I have a desk, I art-direct the pens, and then I can be a whirling dervish.” He goes on, “I want the kid to be bold. And I have a lot of preparation, dealing with these actors. Really? Fuck you. I’m going to do the opposite of what you want. But I realize, you just have to let go or you’re screwed.”
Helping him let go is Miller. “He’s the Rock of Gibraltar,” says Murphy. “Incredibly kind and very wise and not interested in celebrity or money or fame. Just family and love. The very thing I needed at a point in my life when I was like a balloon with no tether. He was like, ‘Sit down. Shut the fuck up. You’re wrong. Be humble. Be smarter. Stop.’ That was David.” He shows me another photo from their big day, one in which David is staring straight into the camera but Ryan is in dramatic profile. “Sweet, right? And don’t think I didn’t pose like that to get that Barbra Streisand jawline. Up and over!”
Speaking of Babs, Murphy’s next big project is adapting and directing Larry Kramer’s seminal AIDS-crisis play The Normal Heart for the big screen starring Julia Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Mark Ruffalo, and Jim Parsons. (Strangely enough, the 2011 Broadway revival starred Ellen Barkin.) Streisand had owned the rights to it in the mid-eighties but for whatever reason never got it off the ground—much to Kramer’s consternation. An e-mail he sent her recently made the rounds on the Internet: “Ryan has wonderful ideas that jell and enhance my work. You said you couldn’t get financing. He has his financing. He said if he couldn’t get it, he’d finance it himself. (You chose to remodel and redecorate your houses.) This is a man whose driving passion to make this movie is extraordinary.” (Streisand responded with a different version of events.)
When I suggest to Ryan that he is sort of like the new Larry Kramer—an accidental activist and firebrand, pushing the boundaries for gay rights, but through show business, not flame-throwing protest—he demurs. “I am not a saint in my work. I do stupid things and fuck up.” But you must sometimes feel like you are doing God’s work, I joke. “Never. I never think of that. All I ever think of is, What would I want to watch? I watch many shows that I am so turned on by and so appreciative of. I love Lena Dunham. I love Girls. I wish I had created that show. And then I like really crazy shit, like Bethenny Frankel. I like people who are like, You know what? I don’t care what you think. I have something to say. That’s why I like Larry Kramer. That’s why I want to do that movie. I have something to say: I’m dying. I really relate to that sweet, necessary concept of protest and anarchy.”
Falchuk wouldn’t describe Murphy as an activist either. “His chief goal is to entertain. But I think he also takes some responsibility for who he is and what he can accomplish through the medium of television: that you can sneak stuff in. You can sneak vegetables into the meat loaf.”
source: Vogue
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