The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
THE COSTUME DESIGNER’S FIRST
encounter with his future profession was through political street theater in the Philippine capital, Manila, where the Cebuborn Ramos was attending boarding school. He was only 10 years old, and a drama teacher had invited him to participate. “I fell in love with this idea of being able to do something collaboratively and working toward this giant thing that moved people, particularly during the [Ferdinand] Marcos regime,” he says of the years before the dictator was deposed in the 1980s. “I was very young, and I saw the power of performance.”
Ramos, 48, would go on to major in theater arts at the University of the Philippines, then immigrated to the United States when he earned a scholarship to NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, where he achieved his MFA in the Design for Stage and Film department. While there, he met playwright and director George C. Wolfe (who most recently helmed Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), at the time the artistic director of The Public Theater. “He was particularly a champion for artists of color, and he saw my work and said, ‘Hey, if you’re interested, we have a couple of plays that need designers,’ ” Ramos recalls.
“It opened a door for me to walk through. That was the first time I encountered Shakespeare. I think normally I wouldn’t be invited to do a Shakespeare play,” he continues. “When I was going to school, there weren’t a lot of people who looked like me. Particularly with my immigrant background, I always felt a lot of people had a leg up on me. I don’t think people looked at me and said, ‘Let’s hire Clint for this show,’ but George was able to see past that.”
That vision has led to a lengthy and prolific career for the stage, where Ramos has served as costume and/or scenic designer for more than 200 theater, opera and dance productions, including more than a dozen on
“THERE’S A FILIPINO SAYING: ‘TRUST SOMEBODY, AND THEY BECOME TRUSTWORTHY.’ IT BASICALLY MEANS: ‘HIRE SOMEBODY, AND THEN THEY BECOME HIRABLE.’ ” CLINT RAMOS
Broadway. He has received five Tony nominations, including a win for best costume design in a play for Eclipsed, making him the firstever nonwhite winner in that category.
“I always point that out because it says something about where we are,” Ramos says. “In film and theater, we pride ourselves for being so inclusive and liberal, yet look at who gets invited to participate. Being first is a double-edged sword: It means it took this long, and also it means that maybe now somebody who comes from a marginalized background can see a future for themselves in the field.” The latter is meaningful to the designer, who upon his arrival in New York used to scan Playbill for people of color on creative teams, searching for hope and possibility.
Although his only previous screen project was Isabel Sandoval’s 2019 indie Lingua Franca, about an undocumented Filipina trans woman, Ramos was asked by Tommy to design the costumes for Respect, a monumental task — 82 planned looks for Aretha Franklin (about 56 or 57 of which made the final cut), 85 percent of it bespoke, plus crowd scenes at concerts and churches that sometimes meant dressing as many as 1,200 people a day.
A dedicated advocate of expanding opportunity and equity for BIPOC and immigrant artists, Ramos — whose dream project is to design a live or feature adaptation of The
King and I (“Every single time, it’s been seen through the lens of a white person, and I would love nothing more than a chance to look at it through a Southeast Asian gaze”) — says the solution is simple yet profound: “There’s this Filipino saying that translates into something like: ‘Trust somebody, and they become trustworthy,’ ” he says. “It basically means: ‘Hire somebody, and then they become hirable.’ ”
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