Identity Politics

Downtown Theatrical Shape-shifter Young Jean Lee Makes Her Broadway Debut With Straight White Men, Starring Armie Hammer.

- Adam Green

ARMIE HAMMER IS A STRAIGHT WHITE MAN who made a name for himself playing such big-screen paragons of straight white manhood as The Social Network’s Winklevoss twins and the Lone Ranger. He went on, of course, to grow as an actor and cement his stardom playing a non-straight white man, opposite Timothée Chalamet, in last year’s Call Me by Your Name. Now he’s returning to type—and making his Broadway debut—in Young Jean Lee’s hilarious, scathing, and mournful play Straight White Men, which opens this month under the auspices of Second Stage at the Hayes Theater. Hammer trained as a theatrical actor but never pursued a career on the stage—so why now?

“The easy answer is that it scared me,” he says. “I’ve come to realize that the point of life is not to be comfortable—you should be in some sort of discomfort and pain at any given moment because that’s the only way to grow, as an actor and as a person. Plus, the play is so brilliant and prescient and timely—it deals so well with the concepts of toxic masculinity and white privilege, which we’re finally reckoning with as a society. And I thought, Not only will I get to push myself and do a play on Broadway but I’ll also get to be part of something that really has something to say.”