Billy Porter's instrument is a big, gospel-inflected voice, and the surprise of Pose is what he does when he lowers it: the comic turn, all shade and eyebrow, turns out to be carrying the grief of the whole series.
Fi1m perspective
Pray Tell stands at a microphone in a hall dressed in red velvet and gold paint, calling the categories, and Billy Porter announces each one as if it were a verdict. The voice is the instrument: big, church-trained in its cadences, pitched to reach the back of any room he is in. For the first few episodes of Pose (2018) you could take him for the light relief, all shade and eyebrow, the man who keeps the party moving while the plot happens to other people.
Then he stops the music. There is a moment in the first season when he speaks to the hall in a voice quite unlike the one he uses for the categories, quieter and slower, and lets his face fall for a second before the mask goes back on. We were got at, and we had not braced for it; we had been enjoying him as a comic turn and were not ready to find him carrying the grief of the whole series. That is the Porter trick, if it is a trick. He spends the volume so freely that the silence, when it comes, costs something.
He was a long time getting there. Broadway ensemble work began in 1991 with Miss Saigon, alongside small film and television parts and a run of solo R&B records, and then very little leading work for a long stretch. The turn came in the theatre, originating Lola, the drag queen who saves a shoe factory, in Kinky Boots (2013), written by Harvey Fierstein with songs by Cyndi Lauper. Pose followed five years later under Ryan Murphy, and Porter has said of that job, "I was set free on that day and I never turned back." Since then there has been the Fabulous Godmother in Cinderella (2021), a part built around the singing and the persona, a first feature as director, Anything's Possible (2022), a trans coming-of-age romcom shot partly in his home city of Pittsburgh, and a recent Cabaret on stage.
The size is the point, and it is also the risk. Given a speech, he will make it, and Pose gave him a great many; the programme's speeches run long, and not all of them needed a man who can hold a note for a week. The one sustained criticism of his stage directing, of The Life in 2022, was that the message crowded out the people, and it is the same danger from the other side of the footlights. He is at his best when someone in charge knows when to turn him down, and the odd thing is that Murphy, who turned him all the way up, also gave him the scenes where he barely moves.
What we would like to see next is a director asking him to be small for a whole film, and Porter saying yes.
Biography
Billy Porter is an American actor and singer. Born on 21 September 1969 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he began his career on Broadway in productions including Miss Saigon and Grease before gaining wider recognition for his solo music releases.
Porter originated the role of Lola in the Broadway musical Kinky Boots (2013), for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. He starred as Pray Tell in the FX series Pose (2018–2021), receiving a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2019.
He won a second Tony Award in 2022 as a producer of A Strange Loop. Porter made his directorial debut with the film Anything's Possible (2022) and has appeared in films including Cinderella (2021).
