“Once I stepped into my womanhood, I felt like the main character of my life,” Dylan Mulvaney tells me, while sipping her lemon drop. “So now that means that I can be the main character on stage.” The social media star and I are dining at Arno, a traditional Italian restaurant, on a frigid evening in January in lower Midtown, a stone’s throw from Penn Station. There’s a good reason we’re dining in a less-than-ideal location—Arno is blocks away from Ripley-Grier Studios, where Mulvaney has just spent the day rehearsing for her Broadway debut as the second, and most infamous, of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn, in the Tony-winning musical Six.
Mulvaney’s penchant for girlish giggles and squeals between bites of her spaghetti pomodoro stand out in Arno, especially when juxtaposed against the sea of older gentlemen in an assortment of ill-fitting grey blazers sitting behind her at the bar. She’s wearing a black ballet dress with her long brown hair half up, half down, instantly reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn—something that was by design. “I noticed if I look good for rehearsal, if I fuck up, I’m like, Oh, well, at least I look good,” she says. After years of living in Los Angeles, she’s adjusting to life in NYC. “I feel like if I walk outside for five seconds, I run into somebody that I’ve slept with or somebody that I want to sleep with. You kind of have to look good all the time.”
Mulvaney’s about a week into a four-week rehearsal process to fulfill a lifelong dream of hers—starring in a Broadway musical. It’s not an understatement to say that the world has watched her reach this moment. Her legion of social media followers—1.5 million on Instagram and 9 million on TikTok, as of publishing—have been hooked on Mulvaney’s confessional online content since she began her series “365 Days of Girlhood” on March 13, 2022, which served as a daily chronicle of her gender-affirming transition from male to female. Mulvaney left nothing off the table—the highs, the lows, and the messy in-betweens of becoming the woman she always knew that she was.
But even pre–social media fame and pre-transition, the San Diego native had grease paint roaring through her veins, but didn’t necessarily know where to put that energy as she struggled with her gender identity. Her theatrical dreams “were so small because I hadn’t found my true self. In order to confine myself to a gender that I knew that I wasn’t,” Mulvaney shares. “I had to be like, ‘Oh, I want to be in the ensemble. I want to be in the back. I want to be tree number three.’” Looking back, she could count on one hand the roles that she felt even partially represented in as a child struggling with their gender identity—Kurt from Glee, Ernst from Spring Awakening. “There were so few roles that I could even find femininity in,” she says
Despite her misgivings, she persisted, studying musical theater at the University of Cincinnati College of Music, a prestigious musical theater program, and even playing Elder White in the national tour of Book of Mormon. There, again, her ambition and dreams were stifled by her present-day reality, trapped in a body that was anathema to her. “When I was doing Book of Mormon, I was like, ‘Well, hopefully I’ll just do this for the rest of my life, and I get a lot of Botox,’” she says, wryly.
Chris Murphy
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