Jeremy O. Harris Is the Greatest Showman

Jeremy O. Harris seems to be everywhere, but he’s not at our agreed upon location at the agreed upon time. We’re supposed to meet at Dimes Deli in Manhattan at 4:30 p.m.; when he gets there around 5:15, he’s apologetic but easy and breezy in a white Bode button-up and jeans. Harris is undeniably striking: six feet five, long-limbed and lean, with a mane of black hair and an almost tangible magnetism.

“I haven’t eaten all day. I’ve been running around since 8 a.m.,” Harris declares. Soon enough, we’re sharing togarashi potato wedges and splitting a bottle of orange wine. It’s one of Harris’s last meals before he heads up to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a storied event that started in 1954, where he’ll serve as this year’s creative director. Meanwhile, reviews for his latest producing venture have just come in, and they are overwhelmingly positive—Prince Faggot is a New York Times critic’s pick. The off-Broadway play by Jordan Tannahill imagines a grown-up Prince George as a kink-loving gay royal and is such a hit that it’s transferring to a bigger off-Broadway theater, Studio Seaview, this fall, with eyes on a spring 2026 transfer to Broadway. Some creatives won’t admit to reading reviews; Harris is not among them. He is going through each one, he tells me, “and picking out my pull quotes.”

If Prince Faggot makes it to Broadway, Harris won’t be a stranger. His first production, Slave Play, premiered off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in 2018 before transferring to the Golden Theatre on October 6, 2019. It went on to nab a record 12 Tony nominations, becoming a controversial phenomenon that launched Harris to fame before he even graduated from the Yale School of Drama.

“There’s nothing more insane than having other people tell you you’re famous when you literally are still counting how much money is in your bank account before you go to dinner,” Harris says now.

Despite going 0 for 12 at the ceremony—another record—his searing examination of sexual dynamics in interracial relationships became the hottest ticket in town, with mononyms like Zendaya, Rihanna, and Madonna rushing to see it. Harris ensured that Slave Play was accessible to members of his own community through “Black out” performances, in which seats were reserved for Black-identifying audience members. (Theaters on both sides of the pond have since adopted his idea for other productions.)

Daddy, which Harris wrote before Slave Play—about a young Black artist becoming intimately involved with an older European art collector—also became an off-Broadway hit in 2019. Model and actor Kaia Gerber, now a close friend of Harris’s, still remembers how she felt when she saw it: “His work is funny precisely because it’s true, and some of those truths force us to confront the parts of ourselves most would rather keep hidden.”

Harris’s knack for exposing the darkest, rawest parts of the human condition and putting them on full display is why—love it or hate it—his work has generated so much discourse. “Jeremy is a voracious student of everything that’s going on everywhere,” says producer and fellow clotheshorse Jordan Roth. “He has a unique ability to synthesize what’s happening in the culture and then find a button to push to activate it in a new and explosive way.” Sometimes Harris’s work is what’s pushing that button. Sometimes it’s Harris himself. “My feelings around Jeremy are more of curiosity, I would say,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Michael R. Jackson. “What he wants, he goes out and gets it.”

Harris, 36, was born to a teenage mother and grew up working-class in a Southern factory town. (I asked multiple people in his orbit what the O stands for; no one seemed to know. According to public records and previous profiles, his middle name is O’Bryant.) “I’ve heard from other people that I have trust-fund-baby allegations, upper-middle-class allegations,” he says. “What people should know, because I’ve said it 5,000 times, is that the threat that’s looming over me—that drives both my ambition and my necessary delusion—is that if this didn’t work by a certain point, I would be back in Virginia working at a Goodyear Tire or at Burger King.”

He’s thus far managed to avoid slinging Whoppers for a living, acting on camera in projects like Emily in Paris and The Sweet East; cowriting the 2021 indie film Zola with his friend actor-director Janicza Bravo; producing more theater, including 2022’s Ain’t No Mo’ and the 2023 Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window; and frequently sharing his life with his almost 200,000 Instagram followers. After a summer producing Prince Faggot, he premiered his top-secret movie Erupcja—which he cowrote, coproduced, and costars in with Charli XCX—at the Toronto International Film Festival. (The response has been positive: “Erupcja is a pleasing 71-minute doodle of a movie,” writes Alison Wilmore at Vulture, while Richard Brody praised its “novelistic amplitude” in The New Yorker.) It’s produced, in part, by BB2, the production company Harris began with his producing partner, Josh Godfrey. In February, his adaptation of Goethe’s play Egmont for the LA Philharmonic will play at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and narrated by Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett. His personal life has been busy too. In late 2022, Harris got engaged to his entertainment executive boyfriend, Arvand Khosravi.

Until now the one thing Harris hasn’t done since 2019 is successfully mount a play of his own. That’s not to say he hasn’t tried. While Slave Play was running on Broadway, Harris concurrently starred in the queer choreopoem Black Exhibition, which he wrote and promoted under the pseudonym @GaryXXXFisher, at the Bushwick Starr. After appearing as himself on HBO Max’s failed reboot of Gossip Girl in 2021, the Public Theater’s Oskar Eustis commissioned a play based on a scene from a fictional production Harris wrote for the series—in which Eustis also made a cameo. The Bloody and Lamentable Tale of Aaron never got off the ground. Another play, a Jacobean revenge tragedy called A Boy’s Company Presents: “Tell Me If I’m Hurting You” was meant to premiere at Playwrights Horizons in May 2020. We all know what was meant to happen in the spring of 2020 but didn’t.

In the postpandemic era, Harris has also been busy hanging out with his ever-expanding clique of celebrity friends and acquaintances. Harris posted on social media that he learned Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race while he was in Italy and texting Madonna. In May, Paul Mescal presented Harris with an award at a party in Cannes.

This year’s Met Gala—Harris’s third—was practically a friend’s dinner party. Inspired by the Met exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the annual event seemed custom-made for Harris, who also served on the host committee. He walked the carpet in custom Balmain, inspired by 19th-century silhouettes. On Harris’s right middle finger, he wore a 2.2-carat peach-brown pear-shaped diamond by jeweler Benjamin Hawkins, inscribed with an enamel portrait of himself.

“Jeremy is truly one of a kind. Everything he does feels so uniquely personal to him,” says designer Thom Browne via email. “That is what makes someone so interesting in fashion and the world—a true sense of oneself, a true confidence.”

Following the gala, Harris cohosted an after-party with Bravo, The Bear star Ayo Edebiri, photographer Tyler Mitchell—who took his portrait for this story—and art curator Antwaun Sargent. Harris stayed out till 11 a.m. with Charli XCX, partying at points throughout the night with the likes of Lorde, Natasha Lyonne, and Robert Pattinson. “All my friends were there,” says Harris, singling out his “group chat of homies”—Bravo, Mitchell, and Sargent. “They’re sort of like my brain trust.”

That brain trust was likely among the first to read Harris’s Spirit of the People, which had its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival on July 17—his first true test as a playwright since Slave Play’s enormous success. “I would be lying if I wasn’t saying that I was a little anxious about it,” Harris says just weeks before the first staging. “Especially doing it in the way that I’m doing it, as a part of this big festival that has this huge history.”

Of course Harris wasn’t only a playwright at Williamstown. He was its creative director as part of a rotating leadership collective, following the conclusion of Jenny Gersten’s term as interim artistic director and the exit of Mandy Greenfield in 2021—after scores of former interns and staffers accused the festival of unsafe working practices, exploitation, a reliance on unpaid labor, and an overall toxic work environment. Greenfield, who tells Vanity Fair that she departed Williamstown after her contract extension ended, says, “In the cultural reckoning of 2020–2021, institutions across the country were looked at with new eyes and decades-long practices and customs fell out of favor; while many changes were already underway at the festival prior to the pandemic, real institutional change requires real time.” (The festival opened an investigation into the allegations, and The New York Times reports that Williamstown ultimately decided to pay all staff members and reduce the amount of programming. Williamstown did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The threat that’s looming over me—that drives both my ambition and my necessary delusion—is that if this didn’t work, I would be back in Virginia working at a Burger King,” says Harris.

Harris got the job when Raphael Picciarelli, one of Williams-town’s two managing directors, DM’d him on Instagram. “I know what would make all these theaters do better and could make them succeed,” Harris says. “I can complain about the programming at all these other places and be like, ‘They did this wrong. They did that wrong.’ Or I could program a season.”

Under Harris’s leadership, Williamstown went all in on the lesser-known works of Tennessee Williams. Pamela Anderson and Nicholas Alexander Chavez starred in a new production of Camino Real, while William Jackson Harper and Chris Messina starred in Not About Nightingales, focused on the American prison-industrial complex. Will Davis created a new work, The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason, inspired by Williams and starring Milk from RuPaul’s Drag Race, performed in an ice rink.

The programming followed Harris’s credo: “He says the things out loud that most of us are too ashamed to even think,” says Gerber, who stopped by Williamstown to participate in a reading of a play by Rianna Simons called White Girls Gang. “I think that’s exactly why his work enrages certain people.”

And Williamstown certainly provoked strong emotions. In a review for The New York Times, critic Jesse Green described Harris as “a ringmaster, half visionary, half hokum” and called the festival “under-rehearsed or overthought,” likening it to “a circus.”

Harris responded directly to Green’s review on X: “Curious if @JesseKGreen’s still receiving mail @nytimes or if there’s an alternate address I should use?” wrote Harris in a public post, in an apparent reference to Green being reassigned off the Times’ theater desk. “We wanted to send him a thank you gift from ’71 for his generous coverage now that he can receive gifts again!” An attached photo pictured the gift: a brown Williamstown ’71 hat and a gray sweatshirt that read “Failed Writer.”

“He says the things out loud that most of us are too ashamed to even think,” says Kaia Gerber, Harris’s close friend. “I think that’s exactly why his work enrages certain people.”

Other critics had warmer sentiments. In his own review of Williamstown ’71 for Vanity Fair, theater critic and writer Juan A. Ramírez wrote that Harris pulled off a mean feat, “crafting one of the most indelible weekends of theater I can think of.” The Emmy- and Tony-nominated Harper, who received rave reviews as Canary Jim in Williamstown’s production of Not About Nightingales, thoroughly enjoyed his experience: “I think he’s incredibly smart, honest, and unfiltered, which is rare,” Harper writes. “I feel like you usually get two out of three at best.”

Jackson also attended the Harris-run Williamstown, though his assessment is more measured. “He’s very connected to the social media ‘vibe’ machine,” says Jackson. “He’s very plugged into that.” Jackson himself has been consciously trying to divest from internet culture. “It’s just my observation,” he says. “He’s very much a product of a very online culture. His work is also that, and all the things that come with that.”

Harris may have pored over Prince Faggot reviews, but, curiously, critics were barred from writing standalone reviews of Spirit of the People. Instead, they were encouraged to review Williamstown “holistically.” Ramírez wrote that the almost three-and-a-half-hour-long new work “is not yet a great play, it is a very strong one,” while Green said it might as well have been called “Men in Thongs.” Although the play wasn’t open to review, Harris reposted congratulatory remarks on his Instagram.

In typical Harris fashion, the playwright sees Williamstown as a stepping stone. “A successful festival “would be an amazing argument for me raising my hand for the Public [Theater] one day,” he says, name-checking legendary theater makers George C. Wolfe and Joe Papp. “That would be my dream.”

I can’t do anything on Juneteenth, because all the white agents are taking a four-day weekend before my first day of rehearsal,” says Harris as we dine. “I hate it. If this is the one thing that all of these white people have kept from 2020, then I hate them even more. Companies that still recognize Black thought, support Black people, and still have some DEI thing, and everyone gets opportunities? Go off, white people. You’re allies. But if you just are violent and aren’t buying Black shows, aren’t signing Black talent? Don’t take Juneteenth off.”

Though “producer” can be a vanity title, actual producing is vital, if unglamorous. Maybe that’s why so many onlookers find it hard to believe that famous people with producer credits are doing any real work. “I’ve talked to a lot of actresses about this,” says Harris. “A lot of actresses are like, ‘Oh, everyone thinks my producing partner does everything.’ ” He can’t help but use two Oscar-winning friends of his as an example. “You talk to J.Law about how this movie comes together: ‘Justine [Ciarrocchi] must have done everything.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m literally a producer. I have taste.’ ” You can practically hear the capital T. “Same with Emma”—Stone, he means.

In 2020 Harris produced Circle Jerk, a hybrid multimedia experience from theater company Fake Friends about a group of queer archetypes trapped on “Gayman Island.” The production was a downtown hit; its creators, Harris’s fellow Yale Drama alumni Patrick Foley and Michael Breslin, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2021. “I’ve been watching myself and my friends all climb up this weird, unwieldy ladder together. And in many ways, doing it without having to compromise,” Harris says. “I think it’s because we had each other to look at and to root each other on, to support each other. That was a gift from Yale.”

Not that his stint at Yale was without drama. Harris’s faculty adviser, downtown playwright Young Jean Lee, had extensive notes on Slave Play—particularly on its sexually transgressive and polarizing final act, in which Black female protagonist Kaneisha engages in a rape fantasy with her white British husband. Harris refused to take Lee’s edits, leading to a heated text exchange. “If you’re that irresponsible about putting a rape of a female body onstage, I’m going to call you out on it in no uncertain terms,” wrote Lee, according to leaked texts. Harris filed a formal disciplinary complaint against Lee. He wrote on social media that the administration declined to investigate because he complained more than 30 days after the incident occurred.

“I think that was her wanting me to heel like a dog. H-e-e-l,” Harris says now, spelling it out to be perfectly clear. “I have oppositional defiance. That is very much a part of my personhood. I think that the thing that Yale had embedded inside of it—and I’m not the first or only person to say that—is the need to break you down to build you back up.” Viola Davis and Audra McDonald have said similar things about their experiences at Juilliard. “I just was not interested in having someone gaslight me,” Harris says. (“Despite inaccuracies in your email,” Lee wrote in response to Vanity Fair’s inquiries, “I’d prefer not to engage.”)

Harris has turned their feud into art, using transcripts from meetings about the dispute as the basis of his senior thesis, Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here. The piece included multiple instances of someone defecating onstage.

Harris has no regrets. “I think she wrote me a very long apology letter by hand on a white note with pink paper that I have in my office,” he says. “I think that if I were to see her at a bar, I would say hello and see what’s up.” He acknowledges that their conflict happened in the wake of the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, which didn’t help. “I think that she was in a weird position. Working at an institution is [like] being in the Stanford Prison Experiment. When someone tells you, ‘You’re the warden. You got to beat the thing,’ some people do it. And some people are like, ‘Guys, this is a school. It’s not a jail.’ ” In any case, Harris selected the winner of Yale’s Drama Series Prize in 2023 and 2024, and Lee is now a professor at Stanford. I remind Harris that we met the summer before he headed to Yale, and I tell him that I remember him saying verbatim, “I’m going to Yale, and I’m going to be a big deal.”

He laughs. “That’s so crazy that I said that. That’s why people don’t like me. I think I have a healthy level of delusion, because I think it’s the only way to survive.”

As Harris was preparing for Williams-town this spring, he teamed up with the New Group to produce the off-Broadway-musical debut from Fake Friends’ Breslin and Foley, The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse—inspired by the New York Post’s “Bimbo Summit” headline, an iconic tabloid photo of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. But a few weeks before its first preview, Alexandra Tynion, CEO and cofounder of under-the-radar entertainment financing and development company Tricky Knot, sent an email that painted a catastrophic picture for Bimbo.

The subject line: “Save the Arts! The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse.” In her message, Tynion begged readers for cash on behalf of the production. “The bad news: Jeremy’s investor just pulled out, and unless we raise $250K by end of day, the show is cancelled,” read the email. The following line was underlined, bolded, and highlighted in yellow: “For a large enough donation or investment, the team is open to offering a producer credit and a portion of the underlying rights for a future commercial transfer.” Wire transfer information for the New Group was attached to the email blast.

To Harris, what happened with Last Bimbo’s investor was “very normal…. A lot of investors don’t know theater,” he says. “One of the things that was really frustrating about this year was that a person who had been very supportive of a lot of work that I’ve done made a commitment and then backed out literally the day before he was supposed to put the money in the bank.” Harris declines to name the investor. “We capitalized that show.”

“When a committed investor unexpectedly backed out, Tricky Knot stepped in, together with bb2, to help save the show under serious time pressure,” said Tynion in a statement to Vanity Fair. “We invested alongside a few of our investors to bridge the gap and partnered with the New Group, who were instrumental in ensuring the production could move forward.”

The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse made it through previews and opened as planned on May 13 to overwhelmingly positive reviews—but its limited run was not extended. Harris has another project planned with Breslin and Foley: The duo is writing the script for The Wives, a forthcoming Real Housewives–influenced A24 and Apple murder-mystery film starring Jennifer Lawrence, with Harris on board as a producer. (Breslin, Foley, Lawrence, and representatives for the New Group did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)

“I had to learn on the fly how to raise a million and a half dollars in a month, and we did it, which is insane,” Harris says.

For most people, theater is not a famously lucrative endeavor. “Every artist is always in a precarious financial position,” Harris tells me. Although he told The New Yorker in 2023 that he was “broke” due to the writers strike, “I have a lot of assets,” he says now. “I own my apartment in Dimes Square. My mom and I own a house in Virginia that I got when I got my HBO deal. And I have art. I have a lot of art that were great gifts and smart purchases when they happened.”

Oh, yeah—HBO.

After serving as a consultant on Euphoria, Harris was given an overall deal at the company in 2020. HBO optioned Brit Bennett’s mega-popular novel The Vanishing Half and announced that Harris would showrun the series with his friend, playwright Aziza Barnes, while Insecure star and creator Issa Rae would executive-produce alongside Stephanie Allain’s Homegrown Pictures. Together, they assembled an all-Black writers room—only the second in HBO’s history, Harris is quick to point out—and got to work.

Except nothing came of it. In 2022, The Daily Beast reported that Harris had been let go from the show “after having trouble meeting script deadlines.” HBO said Harris was “not fired from The Vanishing Half,” citing creative differences that were “part of the normal development process,” and called Harris “a valued collaborator.” He’s since worked with the network on a documentary about Slave Play called Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.

Harris, who calls the The Daily Beast “a gossip rag,” stands by his work. He fondly remembers a staff research trip to New Orleans that he organized and blames the show’s fate on systemic issues at the network. (The Daily Beast did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The reason the show didn’t happen is because the book was bought at a very specific time, in June of 2020,” Harris says. “HBO changed leadership within that time period. The Black woman who advocated for our show to be bought, and was our executive, left.” That woman, Kalia Booker King, departed to work for Sinners director Ryan Coogler’s production company, Proximity Media. But King’s departure wasn’t the only factor. “I don’t think that the pairing of our producers and me and Aziza as writers was necessarily fully a fit. I think that Issa Rae would’ve made an amazing version of the show in her own way. I don’t think she would’ve made the version that me and Aziza were making.” (Rae did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. HBO and King declined to comment.)

Harris has been accused of caring more about his public persona than his written work. Several people I’ve spoken to—including a film and television actor and theater professionals—suggest he has been known to be unreliable, a natural consequence of being overcommitted and overextended. Harris’s talent, they agree, is undeniable. But there are concerns about his follow-through, according to these sources, none of whom were willing to go on the record for fear of alienating Harris, who has a penchant for responding publicly and ferociously to his critics. (See: Jesse Green, Young Jean Lee.) Fear of retaliation notwithstanding, a question hangs over this gifted writer’s head: Is he self-obsessed, or are people just obsessed with him?

“He loves to take on more than he should,” says his former CAA agent, Ross Weiner, reflecting on the roughly eight years he spent representing Harris before he left the industry. “But it was always a good thing.” As of this story’s publication, Harris has no less than six projects in various states of development on IMDb Pro, including The Wives and the seemingly abandoned The Vanishing Half.

Some past collaborators praise him even when the project doesn’t work out. Sydney Baloue, a writer on The Vanishing Half, calls Harris “the creative genius of our time” and said he had an “incredible” experience working on the show. “Jeremy is a brilliant writer,” says Allain. “He and Aziza put together an incredible room of writers who delivered several knockout scripts. Sadly, not everything in development gets made.”

“He loves to take on more than he should,” says Harris’s former CAA agent. “But it was always a good thing.”

On December 15, 2024, Barnes died by suicide. “I was the person that had to call everyone from the writers room and tell them,” Harris remembers. “The thing that got me through was thinking about the fact that there are so many parties Aziza just didn’t want to be at. No matter how social I tried to ask them to be….” He takes a beat. “Life is sort of a party that none of us asked to be invited to. I don’t know that it’s my place to demand that someone stay, while also having a lot of sadness that they’re gone.”

You’re going to go to this play with me now,” Harris commands as we finish our meal at Dimes. It’s called Trophy Boys, an off-Broadway production directed by Tony winner Danya Taymor and starring The Gilded Age’s Louisa Jacobson—another close friend of Harris’s from his Yale days. Though this wasn’t the plan, one doesn’t say no to Harris. I get the check.

On the way, he rolls calls—putting out more theatrical fires while texting Gerber. There’s a controversial big-time producer who wants to see Prince Faggot. “I’m going to get him in tomorrow,” Harris tells one of his agents over the phone. “I have reached out to the man many times. I’m telling you right now: If this man loved me, if he was obsessed with me, if he needed me, he would call me every hour on the hour till I answer.”

He lets out a long sigh. “I am someone who, in this moment of figuring out how to navigate this world, all I have going for me is that everyone recognizes that I have good taste, right?” he says. “It’s all like this weird club. And once you’re in, you’re in.”

Being “in” has consequences. As we ride in the taxi, Harris has a hard time keeping track of everything he has going on—mixing up the names of plays and people, which even single hyphenates are prone to do. When I posit that he might be stretching himself thin, he scoffs.

“I get bored doing one thing. I think it’s a waste of my time.” He searches for a quote about multitasking from a female director—maybe it’s Nancy Meyers, he can’t recall. “It’s all juggling. Some balls are made of glass, and some balls are made of rubber. You have to know that something’s going to fall no matter what. And you have to hope that what falls is rubber and not glass.”

Only, one of those is breakable. “Glass would be like your family, your friends, you know what I mean?” In Harris’s case, that’s his mother, Veronica Farrish; his niece, Kennedy Ocean Johnson; and his nephew, Braelynn Johnson—who appeared in Williamstown’s production of Camino Real. “I’m nepo-ing hard there. My niece and nephew are the new Gwyneth, and I’m Blythe.” And his fiancé, Khosravi, of course. “For me, as important as doing any play is, those things are all rubber. But when too many rubber balls fall, it’s also still frustrating. Then you’re struggling to hold the glass and some glass ends up falling, because the rubber is all bouncing at your feet.” Occasionally, you drop a ball. “I can multitask really, really well. But I can’t multi-catastrophize really well. And there are catastrophes happening everywhere.”

Harris may even be the survivor of a modern one: the extinction of the public intellectual. Like Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Fran Lebowitz, he had an impressive first act: a brilliant, opinionated, and provocative writer makes their mark on culture, then indulges in the resulting stardom. In act two, the paths diverge. Some have tragic ends—Wilde died penniless; Capote, a lonely alcoholic. Some flourish—Baldwin is a literary legend, and Lebowitz, though rarely putting pen to paper, is a household name.

After the play, Harris congratulates Jacobson, and the three of us walk to the subway. Along the way, he invites Jacobson to dinner with him, Gerber, and actor Adam DiMarco. While Harris’s day is far from over, my time with him has come to an end. When we get to the subway, Harris can’t find his wallet. “I think it’s in my other bag,” he says, searching. Don’t worry; he finds his way onto the train anyway.

Sittings Editor: Nicole Chapoteau. Hair, Veronica Farrish; Grooming, Ryann Carter. Produced By Moxie Productions. For details, go to VF.com/credits.