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‘Those Friends people make $100m a year! I’m getting six-cent cheques! It’s not OK!’: Billy Porter on race, recognition and the Middle East

The Pose star plays a divorcing dad in Our Son, but he has other things on his mind – such as getting paid, why his James Baldwin biopic is like Barbie and trying to understand the Israel-Gaza conflict

But his latest role, in the Bill Oliver-directed relationship drama Our Son, takes a different tack: as Gabriel, a relatively meek stay-at-home dad divorcing his husband, Nicky, (Luke Evans), Porter is required to play small, wounded and, sometimes, bitter, without any of the glitz or glam of his best known characters. Peering out from Zoom in a hotel room in Florida, dressed (relatively) casually in a white T-shirt with sparkly rainbow accents, he comes across as a born orator, delivering every response as if he’s playing to the cheap seats in an auditorium. A few months removed from the resolution of the strike, he feels like Sag and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) “came to some really good terms”, but he’s still miffed that “the burden and the fallout still gets passed on to us, and not the people in the C-suite”.

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