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Imagine a cute, young, gay Jim Carrey with a withering line in put-downs: that is Andrew Rannells. Or rather, it was, back when he starred in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls as Elijah, the formerly closeted ex of her character, Hannah. Dunham had seen Rannells playing Elder Price, the zealous missionary spreading the good word in the original 2011 Broadway production of the bad-taste musical The Book of Mormon, for which he received a Tony nomination. Girls, in turn, spread the good word about him. To this day, fans still shout “Your dad is gay!” at him in the street, a call-back to the moment when Elijah tartly advises Hannah that she might want to fine-tune her gaydar.
It is an older, gentler, salt-and-pepper-bearded Rannells who stars in the comedy-drama Miss You, Love You. He plays Jamie, a personal assistant arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to shepherd the spiky and recently widowed Diane (Allison Janney) through the initial weeks after her husband’s death from Parkinson’s. As it dawns on them that Diane’s son – Jamie’s employer – may not make it to his stepfather’s funeral, these strangers navigate their way through the grey area of their flung-together friendship.
Initially, Jamie struggles to retain composure in the face of Diane’s gale-force disdain, as she picks and pecks at his every word. “I was just trying to keep up with what Allison was doing,” says Rannells, who is wearing a silvery-grey shirt and running a hand through his chestnut quiff. He knew Janney from starring together in the comic thriller Another Simple Favor, but nothing prepared him for being harangued by her during the new film’s extended takes. “She is relentless. She goes and goes and goes. All her years on The West Wing really prepped her.”
Rannells is hardly low-energy himself. Whether in his impish US television appearances, collected in YouTube compilations with titles such as “andrew rannells being a little TOO ICONIC on talk shows”, or in his shopping-mall song-and-dance number as an incorrigible Juilliard graduate in Ryan Murphy’s The Prom, he is all razzle-dazzle. “Yeah, I’m usually in that position,” he concedes. “It was fun this time to be on the other side of it and to feel what it’s like to get pushed around and bullied.”
It is a few weeks before his 48th birthday and Rannells is speaking on a video call from the home in Los Angeles he shares with the actor Tuc Watkins and the latter’s twin teenage children. The room behind him is blurred, so it is impossible to identify the three paintings on the wall, but since Rannells put his stylish Manhattan apartment on the market last year for nearly $2.5m (£1.8m), Dogs Playing Poker is unlikely to be among them.
He and Watkins met on the 2018 Broadway revival of the pre-Stonewall chamber-piece The Boys in the Band. Their first kiss was in character. “We would end each show making out on stage. Ten minutes of us rolling around while Jim Parsons was crying.” They hooked up but didn’t start dating until a year later, when the cast reconvened for Murphy’s Netflix version. “We turned a showmance into a relationship,” he says with a little twitch of the eyebrow.
Given his success, it is natural to assume that Rannells’ performance as Jamie in Miss You, Love You was based on his own experience of having PAs. On the contrary, he says – he has never hired one. This may make him something of an outlier in Hollywood. “One of my closest friends has an assistant. At times, I’m closer to the assistant than I am to him.” Why has Rannells resisted? “Maybe it comes from years of working in theatre. I got in the habit of doing things for myself. To relinquish that control now would be, I think, hard for me.”
Knowing when and how to ask for help is one of the lessons that Jamie must learn in the film. Rannells can sympathise. “You are raised in the midwest to take care of your own problems: don’t make waves, fix it, move on. Sometimes I do myself a disservice by not asking for what I need. I’m getting better at it. But I’ve certainly seen it abused. A lot of actors take advantage of people and I don’t want to be that person.”
He grew up next door to a children’s theatre in Omaha, Nebraska, and took drama classes from a young age. Performing soon began to pay: from 13 to 31, he was a prolific voice actor in cartoons including Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. That spilled over into his burgeoning stage career: at 21, he toured the US in Pokémon Live!. “In retrospect, [I] would rather have done a snuff film or porn,” he said later.
His big, gay New York life was under way by then. He came out to his parents shortly before leaving home to study drama at 19. “My family was mostly – what’s the best way to say this? – not shocked,” he wrote in Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood. That 2019 book also revealed, in a chapter entitled It’s Never the Priest You Want to Kiss, that he had been sexually assaulted as a teenager by a Catholic priest.
“My mum accepted my sexuality,” he says. “My dad said: ‘I don’t think you have to be this way, but I love you.’ I was like: ‘Eh, that’s not exactly what I wanted to hear, but whatever.’” A few months later, his father reached a different conclusion. “He said: ‘I realise you’ve always been this way and I’m sorry I said that.’” Hadn’t his dad introduced him to 1940s musicals from a young age? “Exactly! It was his fault.”
Coming out was relatively plain sailing, but there was a crisis ahead. When Rannells was 22, he brought a date back to his apartment. In the bathroom later, he checked the phone messages he had been ignoring for the previous few hours and found that his family had been frantically trying to reach him. His father was in a coma; a few days later, he died.
That night, with its intermingling of sex, intimacy and mortality, left an impression on Rannells. In 2017, he wrote about the awkwardness of being consoled in this devastating moment by a naked man he hardly knew: “After I hung up, he tried to hug me: ‘What happened?’ I wanted to shout: ‘Clearly nothing good! Put on some pants!’”
That essay inspired him to write and direct How Do You Remember Me?, his half-hour contribution to the Amazon series Modern Love. In the screen version, he highlights the disparity that exists between separate recollections of identical events. “I’m sure that guy has gone off and told that story, especially as I’ve become successful,” he says. “And I’m sure it’s mostly the same as mine – but also pretty different.”
Rannells had his own experience of seeing the familiar from a revealing new angle when he read Dunham’s recent memoir, Famesick. Its tales of behind-the-scenes horrors on Girls include the allegedly hostile behaviour of Adam Driver, who Dunham claims berated her for forgetting her lines before hurling a chair at the wall next to her. “That book is a great example of seeing things differently,” Rannells says. “Girls was my first TV job and when I showed up on set I saw the fun, exciting part. At times, Lena would open up to me and I’d read things in the press that were untrue or unfair. But the book was hard to read as someone who is close to her now. I felt terrible that I wasn’t a better friend.”
What could he have done? “Been more available. I let a lot of shit slide because so much was happening. I had a break-up, then a new relationship. I was doing The Book of Mormon eight times a week and working on Girls.” He left to shoot 22 episodes of Murphy’s 2012 gay-dads sitcom, The New Normal, before returning to Girls when The New Normal was cancelled. “Of course, there was another part of reading her book,” he says. “I was, like: ‘Why didn’t she talk about me more?’” Joking he might be, but there is a Reddit thread on that very topic. “I would like to say I started that thread, but I did not,” he says. The eyebrow twitches again. Did he or didn’t he? As ever with Rannells, you are left with a tantalising question mark.
