"Can all of us be in the same room at the same time?,” Jeremy Pope asks over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. It is over a month into lockdown, but he isn’t questioning the rules of physical distancing. Rather, the 27-year-old is pondering the unspoken rules of Hollywood prejudice – who gets to share a platform with whom, and whether there’s only space for one minority figure at any given time.
Pope’s latest project – his first major TV role – is in Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series Hollywood, a revisionist story set in 1940s Golden Age tinseltown, where he plays Archie, a gay, black screenwriter who is trying to break into the industry. It is a story he could relate to.
“What’s brilliant about our series is that you have a powerful man like Ryan Murphy who is capable of making any type of TV he wants, and then he makes a show like this – showing the world what it could have been,” Pope says. “And I am what it can be, he’s given me my debut TV opportunity. I often feel very similar to Archie and I wonder: is there room for another black man like me?”
Read the feature in the Guardian.
[This piece was published on 05/05/20]