Jeremy O. Harris on Professional Pressures, ‘Euphoria,’ and (Finally) Bringing ‘Daddy’ to London

Jeremy O. Harris wrote his play, Daddy, for his family—just not, perhaps, in the traditional sense. “For a long time, I was a mystery to my family,” the bright-eyed 32-year-old says from a rehearsal room at the Almeida Theatre in London, where the hit play is preparing to make its pandemic-delayed U.K. debut. As its first member to become an artist, he started out making inaccessible, experimental work that “felt alienating to my family; so much of it didn’t look or feel like us.” 

And so Daddy was born as a love letter to them. Like the soap operas his grandmother loved, it’s a modern melodrama, incorporating his Protestant upbringing and its Christian morality plays, while centered on the relationship between a young Black gay artist and an older, moneyed white art collector. The plot fabricates from the second act of Harris’s life—inspired by the heady, polychromatic experiences he had living in L.A., couch-surfing and doing odd jobs, surrounded by friends who were sugar babies, and men who “promised you castles in the sky.” 

Over three years, concepts brewed in his mind, and were finally forced to take shape under social pressure to explain what he was working on. “Elements would appear in improvisational conversations with people where I’d have to legitimize my practice by literally making shit up on the spot,” he laughs. “That was my process for the play for about two years before someone was like, ‘Can I read it?’”

Long before it was performed to the public, Daddy was the play that earned Harris a spot at Yale graduate school, an agent, and a job as screenwriter of one of the best films of last summer, Zola. But it was his 2018 play *Slave Play—*the record-breaking, 12-time Tony-nominated theatrical sensation—that turned him into a global star. 

Since then, he has become a new, singular sort of socialite and celebrity—a playwright with Gucci sponsorships, acting appearances in Emily In Paris and Gossip Girl, capsule collections on Ssense, famous friends like Rihanna and Rosalía—though he’s guided by an almost ancient principle. “The Greeks wrote plays to change the ways in which community members voted. In an age of social media, if you’re not social in tangent with your work, maybe you aren’t fully doing the work of making sure all of your ideas get heard.” After advising on Euphoria, he’s now working on two of his own HBO shows—one based on his drama school days at Yale. Ahead of Daddy’s London premiere, the Renaissance man speaks to Vogue.