It’s good to know that Ben Platt and Molly Gordon’s failed childhood romance didn’t keep them from remaining life-long friends. The actors star in “Theater Camp,” a mockumentary about a performing arts summer camp co-directed by Gordon and Nick Lieberman. Said romance bloomed when Platt and Gordon were just 7 years old.
“I gave her this charm bracelet as I-guess-we’re-going-to-date-now,” Platt remembers during an appearance on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “She freaked out and told her mom, ‘I’m not ready,’ so I gave it to a different girl. Instead, I gave Molly a picture frame with a picture of me and Molly in it because I was like, ‘Here’s a friendship thing.’ Then she was devastated.”
Joining Platt on the podcast was his “Theater Camp” co-star and husband-to-be Noah Galvin. “Theater Camp,” based on a 2020 short of the same name, was written by the couple as well as Gordon and Lieberman.
The film, which also includes Ayo Ediberi, Amy Sedaris, Jimmy Tatro, Alan Kim, Patti Harrison and Caroline Aaron, is often compared to Christopher Guest films. “It’s our wildest dreams,” Platt says, adding, “’Waiting for Guffman’ was such a huge inspiration… Also just part of the reason we wanted to make the film in the first place is to have a place to collect our community of funny, talented friends, and give them a place to play, and give them autonomy and create this little collective of our own.”
Galvin says, “We were just the right people for the job. We all came from the world of youth theater. We all love it so much, and it’s so near and dear to our heart, so much so that I think we were the right people to also skewer it, and make fun of it.”
The two, who announced their engagement on Instagram in November after Platt proposed to Galvin, couldn’t actually separate their work from their personal lives. “On this movie, Molly, Ben, Nick, and I all lived in a house together about 12 minutes from the camp,” Galvin says. “I think on a movie like this when you have 19 days, limited funds, limited everything, so much goose poop on the ground, a lot of mosquitoes, a lake filled with E. coli, there’s no real way to leave that space…without bringing it home with you. While I think in a lot of other cases that could be unhealthy. I think it really served the piece, and it made it feel that much more like camp.”
Platt goes so far as to describe the project as “our first child together.”
Being the musical queens that they are, I also had Platt and Galvin weigh in on a number of Broadway-themed questions.
While they were reluctant to name their least favorite show, Platt eventually conceded: “I once saw a strange tour of ‘Grease’ I didn’t totally love. It wasn’t even really a national tour. It was a regional sitdown in San Francisco… of an interesting bare bones ‘Grease,’ and the material didn’t really hold up that well.”
If their wedding had to be a Broadway themed, Galvin’s top choice is “The Secret Garden.” But then Platt said, “Although you don’t want it to be super lush, so maybe that’s wrong.”
“Theater Camp” is in theaters July 14.
Listen to the full interview with Platt and Galvin above. You can also find “Just for Variety” wherever you download your favorite podcasts.
