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.
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 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. 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. 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. 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.
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