Weird science
Iconic underdog John Cameron Mitchell keeps up the experimental spirit of 'Hedwig'
WHEN John Cameron Mitchell wrote and starred in the drag musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” in 1998, his theater pals were stumped.
“They didn’t understand why I was doing it,” Mitchell, 55, tells The Post over lunch. “It seemed to them to be a step down in my career. And I was like, ‘How dare you? Versions of drag are as old as the Greeks!’ ”
Mitchell, of course, had the last laugh. “Hedwig” became a cult hit downtown, a 2001 film that he directed and starred in, and a 2014 Broadway show with Neil Patrick Harris. Mitchell eventually replaced him, and won a Special Tony Award for it.
Now when the director picks out-of-the-box projects, nobody bats an eye.
His latest, “How To Talk to Girls at Parties,” out Friday, is a genre-bender that mixes 1970s romantic comedy with science fiction. In it, a British punk scenester (Alex Sharp) falls in love with an American New Age cult member (Elle Fanning) who’s actually an alien.
It’s low budget and proudly strange. Just the sort of fare Mitchell feeds off of.
“Sometimes, to my detriment, I don’t do jobs for money,” he says.
Still, despite its small scale, the movie features Nicole Kidman as a brash punk-rock promoter with loud volume and even louder hair. It’s the opposite of her part on HBO’s “Big Little Lies.”
“That’s why I like her,” Mitchell says of Kidman. “Because she seeks out the challenging, the different, the bizarre.”
Kidman learned the part while she was performing in the play “Photograph 51” in London’s West End. Mitchell would show up daily at the Noël Coward Theatre’s stage door ready to work.
“Between shows I’d go to her dressing room and we’d rehearse,” he says. “And because we had little time, she said, ‘Just say the lines, because this is a part you’d want to play anyway. And I’ll copy you!’ ”
While he and Kidman had worked together before — she was nominated for an Oscar for 2010’s “Rabbit Hole,” which he directed — Mitchell found his other stars by happenstance. He met Sharp, a Tony winner for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” at an awards event, and Ruth Wilson, the British star of “The Affair,” at their physical therapist’s office. “We were both having knee trouble,” he says.
For someone with a résumé as distinguished as Mitchell’s, he lives modestly, in the same rent-stabilized West Village apartment he’s had for 25 years.
“I don’t spend money I don’t have,” he says. “I don’t buy on credit.” He does, however, support his neighborhood, hosting a monthly party at local gay bar Julius — considered by many to be the city’s oldest — to help the famous watering hole regain popularity.
He tours his cabaret act around the world, partly to pay for his mother’s Alzheimer’s care, but plans to start auditioning again for a regular TV role. (He says he’s usually typecast as “the kooky coroner.”)
“I live the gig economy like all young people do now,” he says. “But I always have.”