Actor Ben Platt has cut short an interview after being asked about claims his career was helped by the fact his father is a film producer, according to a journalist.
The actor, who has appeared on stage and screen, was speaking to EJ Dickson of Rolling Stone in the US.
Dickson said she asked about the 2022 New York Magazine cover, The Year of the Nepo Baby, which featured the faces of celebrities including Maya Hawke, Lily Collins, Dakota Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp and Platt, photoshopped onto the heads of babies.
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It claims the performers were given a boost by their family industry links.
“You were on the cover of New York Magazine‘s Nepo Baby issue. I’m curious, what was your response to that? And what do you make of that whole discourse?” probed Dickson during the interview, which Platt was participating in for promotions for his new film Theater Camp.
Platt simply responded with, “We’re going to skip right over that if we can,” according to Dickson.
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When Dickson asked if there was officially “No comment?” on the issue, she said Platt’s publicist intervened, saying, “If we could just focus on Theater Camp, that would be great. Thank you.”
Dickson claimed she only got a few more questions in before the publicist intervened at the halfway mark of what was supposed to be a 45-minute-long interview, telling her to wrap it up with one more question.
Platt’s experience with the “nepo baby” title came to a head when he was cast as the teenage lead in the high school-based Dear Evan Hansen musical film in 2021, despite being 27.
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Platt had previously undertaken the role in the stage version at age 23, and had even won the Tony Award for Best Actor in 2017 for his performance.
Despite much backlash about the film casting, Platt, whose father Marc Platt was a producer on the film, continued in the role.
The film ended up underperforming at the box office with many negative reviews from critics.
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At the time the trailer was released, Platt called out the “randos being jerks” about his age in the film with a succinct tweet.
“Thank u from the bottom of my [heart] for the outpouring of trailer love yesterday,” Platt wrote in the tweet that has since been deleted
“The film required me to revisit areas of personal pain, so seeing ppl excited & moved makes it so deeply worth it. PS to the randos being jerks about age, read this great article and/or watch Grease.”
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The article he linked to was an interview he did with Vanity Fair, addressing the age discrepancy, where he said, “I think everybody obviously had in their minds that I wasn’t going to stay teen-adjacent forever,
“The need to get it done was a little urgent. Then of course the pandemic happened, and I kind of assumed that was that — it would be a no-go, and by the time the pandemic was over, I’d have outgrown it.”
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