A biography for John Cameron Mitchellhasn’t been written yet.
“Some people go off to an ashram or they, you know, have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. For me, I do 'Hedwig,' and I see it's a midlife crisis maybe, and I see what's next. And it's a good trampoline, maybe, into the next part of my life.”
“We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.”
“My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.”
“New York is so unique, and you are not always encouraged to consider the people in the city your neighbors because of the fast pace and surface anonymity.”
“I went to a very small Catholic school. It wasn't an easy place to be growing up gay.”
“Anger is so constructive.”
“The first rock stars were incredibly theatrical. Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley - they were theater artists.”
“'Hedwig' is unabashedly analog.”
“I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.”
“I sometimes buy albums that I don't like now, but that I know I will like. Coming out was the same thing. In high school, I thought, 'I know I'm going to have to deal with this, but I'm not confident enough now.' But when I finally did, my whole life changed.”
“You get all these French directors who have all these pretty, vacuous stars of their movies - from Jean Seberg on - who have become iconic but were never really good actors.”
“People know what 'Hedwig' is now, and that's wonderful. It's not the same as being swamped for being on 'The Big Bang Theory,' but it's much more comfortable.”
“I remember seeing a stage version of Plato's 'Symposium' and being really moved because it was written by a man rather than a culture.”
“Obviously, when you get into larger budgets, you have less of that freedom, and I just - I'm not a person that tends to make stories for those larger budgets. To me, it's not much fun to have that kind of pressure.”
“The things that interest me are less to do with perhaps finding myself and more to do with surviving and mercy and forgiveness.”
“Some people end up becoming just a conservator of the one thing they did and making sure they get their merch out and all that.”
“After the first 'Hedwig,' interestingly, I was offered to play Hamlet a couple of times.”
“I've avoided situations where I wouldn't have creative freedom.”
“London is the English-speaking theatre capital.”