As if Pride Month couldn’t get any gayer, “And Just Like That” Season 2 and Kim Cattrall’s new Netflix series, “Glamorous,” are premiering on the same day, June 22. “Isn’t that incredible?” says Cattrall’s co-star, actor and musician Miss Benny. “That is the gay stuff that I love. I’m excited for our show. I’m excited for that show. I’m excited for the spectacle of it all.”
In “Glamorous,” Miss Benny plays Marco, a gender-nonconforming wannabe influencer who lands a job working for a beauty mogul (Cattrall). Miss Benny says Cattrall signed on to “Glamorous” after watching a clip of them playing a “sexual, raunchy and queer” character on “American Horror Stories.” “That blows my mind because I did that whole part saying, ‘What if I do it with a little bit of Samantha?’” they say. “I mimic her portrayal of Samantha a lot in my campier work.”
“Glamorous” features a multitude of queer characters. “Having a melting pot of the LGBTQ community is so rare on TV, because usually we have one character to represent everybody, right?” says Miss Benny, who identifies as nonbinary. “I don’t know about you, but I live in such a homo-normative world. Anytime I see something where it’s just one gay character with a bunch of straight people, I’m like, ‘I’ve never seen that in real life ever.’ If I throw a rock around me, I’ll hit 10 gay people.”
However, Miss Benny admits they weren’t always embraced. “I was told for years that it wasn’t time for someone like me. When I got the audition for ‘Glamorous’ four years ago, I remember I went into my first meeting as like a diet version of myself because I was certain that even though they had written Marco to be flamboyant and be gender nonconforming, I was like, ‘They don’t really want me to be me. They want me to do a sanitized, smaller version of me,'” they say. “But the only note they had for me was, ‘Just relax. We want you to be as flamboyant as you are in real life. We want to capture that magic.’ That was so validating so when I got the part, I fell to my knees and cried. I know I could be a bit melodramatic but it really was the first time someone in the industry ever looked and me and said, ‘Yeah, this works. We don’t need to change a thing.’”
In May, Miss Benny released their latest single, “Break Away,” along with a music video for the song.
Asked who they’d like to hit the studio with, Miss Benny says fellow queer artist Omar Apollo is at the top of the list. “I saw him at a party recently and the person I was with was like, ‘Should we go and introduce ourselves?’” Miss Benny recalls. “I was like, ‘Are you crazy? I’ll just fall over.’”
Kim Petras is another dream collaborator. “All the queers!” Miss Benny says. “I’m looking at all the queers. But Omar, the love of my life? I would be losing my mind.”
