Andrew Rannells is the sort of affable where, within minutes of conversation, you immediately feel like you’ve known him forever; we banter so much with our waiter that we end up taking a picture with him at the end of our breakfast. The actor first gained attention starring in The Book of Mormon on Broadway. Then came Girls, where he played the Elijah Krantz to Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath.
He’s followed that up with theater, movie and TV work, voice acting, and writing (he’s published two books, a memoir and a collection of personal essays). This spring, the now 47-year-old features in the second season of the Hulu sitcom Deli Boys (as a Philadelphia mayoral hopeful and foe of the series’ protagonists) and hosts The Great American Baking Show with Casey Wilson. He also co-stars opposite Allison Janney in Jim Rash’s new HBO movie Miss You, Love You, out May 29.
Though he’s generally an early riser, Rannells does not identify as a breakfast person. Nevertheless, he enjoyed two cold brews, an omelet, and a side of breakfast sausage with CULTURED at the Wythe Hotel’s Le Crocodile in Williamsburg.
What’s your relationship to Los Angeles?
The first time I went there was in 2012. I’ve just bounced back and forth [between New York and LA] since then. It’s where my partner Tuc [Watkins] is with his kids. He has 13-year-old twins. We all live together in LA.
That’s fun.
It is so fun with teenagers. Teens.
Do they want to do things with you, or are they in the teenage phase?
They don’t want to talk to us.
What is Allison Janney like to work with?
She’s much kinder than a lot of the women that she plays. To get to go [to New Mexico] with her was just the best. Then strangely, when we were finishing Miss You, Love You, we both got offers to do Another Simple Favor. Four days later we were on a plane together to Rome.
Two very different filming experiences.
Albuquerque is not Rome. In Rome, it was a huge budget movie with all the time in the world. I worked for four days but was there for three weeks. Allison and I just got to kick around. We would have these days where I would just walk around with her and watch her shop.
Did Jim Rash [the director of Miss You, Love You] write the part with you in mind? It feels like such a special fit.
I don’t know. He wrote it, and then he reached out to me. I’d never met him before, and I had never been offered a part like this before. In theater, I’ve played larger roles and been responsible for more of the storytelling. But on film I have generally been the sassy friend. I was like, “Holy shit, this is a lot to be responsible for.” I feel like you saw a lot more movies like this in the ’90s, in that it’s two people hashing out feelings and complications. We’re not vampires and no one gets murdered.
Julia Roberts showed up to the special Sundance screening. [Her husband, Daniel Moder, was the film’s cinematographer.] Did you get to talk with her at all about the movie?
She did come to visit the set. Which was … How do you prepare to meet Julia Roberts? We don’t have movie stars like that anymore. Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt are the last two movie stars. There’s no one more famous.
They’re brand names.
Because of the way our business works and the way people watch things, there’s not one person everyone knows. Everyone knows Julia Roberts. When she came to set, she came in like a movie star. She was so gorgeous. Her hair looked great. She smelled great. I was like, Oh my God, I don’t even know what to say. What do you say? Thank you for your service?
How do you generally pick your roles at this point?
I wish I could say I’m always in control. I’m an actor, I like to work. But as I get older, I do think there’s much more thought put into, Okay, I’m going to have to leave town, disrupt my routine, my life, not see my boyfriend and not see the kids. Is this going to be worth the effort? That’s just something that comes with age.
What’s your relationship to Girls at this point? What do people most often say when they see you on the street?
“Your dad is gay.” There are certain parts of the country where—I did two episodes of How I Met Your Mother—and people will be like, “You’re that guy from How I Met Your Mother.” I’m like, “What?!” But recently Girls had a strange resurgence of people watching it for the first time. The perception of how we behave on that show is a little different now. Lena and I had this young woman come up to us, and she said, “I don’t think you guys were being selfish, I think you were just taking care of yourselves.” I was like, “No, we were pretty bad. We were selfish characters.”
I think Lena said this recently, that maybe people can watch it now in this more almost pure way, without any of the discourse around it. There was so much around the show when it was actually airing.
Well, Lena took all the hits. It was very troubling as someone who became her friend in that process to see how people responded to her. I remember even New York magazine was a friend at the beginning and then started writing these hit pieces about Lena and about the show. And I was like, “Why has this turned so quickly? I don’t understand.” How do you go from saying somebody is brilliant to, “She’s a narcissist.” She’s playing a character, and somehow people got confused and thought it was her.
It got conflated.
It was not a documentary, it was a television show. But because she was young and a woman and not your typical leading lady in a lot of ways, people went from supporting her to then being so critical of her. It was really hard to watch. Her book came out and we did this event at BAM, and I had to say to her “I’m sorry because I thought we were having a good time and I didn’t realize how painful all of that was.” I was just coming in and out naïvely being Elijah and saying cunty things and having a blast. She was dealing with a lot.
Are you someone who reads reviews, comments, Twitter?
I try not to. I’d never been in a position where anyone was writing anything about me. Then, when I was doing Book of Mormon, after I performed at the Tony Awards, I had hired a publicist for the first time, and we got in the car after the Tony’s, and she said, “You’re trending on Twitter.” I was like, “What does that mean?” A lot of the comments were great and a lot of the comments were not great, about my physical appearance or whatever. I decided in that moment in that car, maybe I don’t read the comments.
The first thing that I seriously got to write was a “Modern Love” column. I got to turn it into a whole book, in fact. But that one essay, they had to shut off the comments because people got so nasty about the gay part, the sex part. I did dive into those comments, and I would say that a lot of the negative comments were really homophobic. And this was not that long ago.
Do you feel things have gotten any better in Hollywood in terms of representation of gay characters and content? Heated Rivalry obviously got so much attention.
There’s more space given. Heated Rivalry is an interesting example. It’s great and both of those actors are great, but it seemed to be written by a straight woman for straight women. It felt a bit like fan fiction of gays. You’re like, “Oh, this woman has never been near a gay person.” Even the coming out was, like, the parents were fine, it was okay. And the idea that these two young, hot men have sex with each other and are like, “This is it, let’s lock it down,” is not how it works, at least in my experience. Maybe season two will explore them meeting some other people and being like, “Well, maybe I want to fuck that guy.”
Not for nothing, I was going to say, I started receiving fan fiction when I was doing Falsettos, which centers around a gay couple played by Christian Borle and me. I started receiving a lot of fan fiction from women and young girls writing about me—
You as Andrew Rannells or you as the character?
It started as the character and then it morphed into me, Andrew Rannells. These young women and girls were writing about me and Jonathan Groff, which had nothing to do with Falsettos. There was one about Jonathan Groff and I going to the farmer’s market. It was about us running errands, just being cute together, and wearing sweaters that complemented each other, and apple picking. That to me was a little like Heated Rivalry.
But I do hope that maybe producers or network executives will see that Heated Rivalry was successful and that there is space to tell more of those stories. When I moved to LA, I was doing a show called The New Normal for Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler. This was 15 years ago. NBC initially was like, “Oh, Modern Family is such a big hit. People loved Cam and Mitch. People loved that. So if there’s a whole show about a gay couple, that’d be great, right?” No. People were so resistant to watching an entire series centered on a gay couple. They were like, “It’s too much.” The audience just wasn’t ready. It also wasn’t a sexy show. It was about two people having a baby.
What’s stressful to you these days?
The state of the world. The state of our business. Will I ever work again?
Are you a breakfast person?
Not traditionally.
Would you say you’re a morning person?
I am with the kids. It’s a 6 a.m. wake-up most days. They have to leave for school by 7:30. So Tuc and I get up at around 6, we feed the dog, do that whole routine, and then get them out.
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