Performer Miss Benny had been acting for a few years, finding it difficult to find roles that felt authentic, when fate intervened. One day while assisting on a photo shoot, she received a call about a comedy about a makeup artist YouTuber and knew that was the best option of anything she’d seen. After two weeks of auditions, Miss Benny landed the role of Marco in the new Netflix series, “Glamorous.”

In the show, Marco is a gender nonconforming queer person who gets a job working alongside makeup legend Madolyn Addison, played by Kim Cattrall.

Miss Benny perceives Marco as a very outwardly vibrant and flamboyant person who sees queerness as a superpower and uses makeup and fashion to survive in the real world.

“As the season goes on, we get to see Marco navigate first relationships, success and failure in career, relationships with family and identity,” she said. “Towards the end of the season, Marco views makeup and fashion not just as a protection mechanism but a form of identity and it’s really powerful.”

Marco sees Madolyn as a queer icon and legend and star, equally in awe of her and intimidated.

“That is perfect, because that is how I feel about Kim Cattrall,” she said. “It was easy to access that as an actor because every time I was with Kim, I did truly feel starstruck, with a need to impress her.”

When Miss Benny found out Cattrall was in the show, she almost fell out of her chair.

“I had been recommending and manifesting her,” she said. “It felt like such a long shot. She is perfect for Madolyn. She has a lot of monologues and quirky one-liners. If you like Samantha Jones, you’ll love Madolyn Addison.”

The ensemble is deep, including other queer talent such as Matt Rogers. That takes some of the pressure off Miss Benny.

“A lot of people get to tell their own story of identity within the queer community,” she said. “Usually when you’re a queer character on a show, you are the only queer character. What I love about this show is that being straight is a minority. All of us get to collectively carry our own range and have space instead of feeling so much pressure to be every queer person’s experience.”

A pilot for the show was filmed in 2019, went through three years of development and then had a network change. Miss Benny is glad it wound up on Netflix.

“Even five years ago, a show like this was daring to make,” she said. “It’s truly a sign of the times that a studio like Netflix is ready to take something like this on. It’s encouraging that they gave us a platform.”

The HBO original documentary film, “Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is now streaming, having premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It is directed by the Oscar-winning team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. In 2016, out artist Taylor Mac headlined an immersive theater performance in Brooklyn that offered something of an alternative take on the history of the United States. The documentary chronicles that work.

Both men have been fans of Taylor Mac, starting with his show, “The Lily’s Revenge” in 2011. From that show on, they saw what he was doing as a theater artist, working with audience immersion and breaking form. His queer sensibility spoke to them, Friedman said.

It took a while for Mac to get noticed and find his performing niche.

“He is doing something really new,” Epstein said. “He is not a traditional drag queen. He uses drag as a metaphor for a time or an event. He is a theater artist and is creating new forms. He redefines what theater can be. In some ways, he goes back to theater roots and uses theater as a community building tool.”

It’s a very queer world that Taylor evokes, and the directors wanted to capture that.

“As [Taylor’s musical partner] Matt Ray says at one point in the film, Taylor is inviting people outside the queer community to the queer community,” Epstein said. “Community is the keyword. Part of what it means to be queer in our lifetime is to become part of a community. When gay people started coming out post-Stonewall it was in the context of making communities in cities such as San Francisco, Manhattan and Atlanta, urban centers where people could feel safe and find each other. Taylor’s piece feels very much part of that revolution.”

The two started working together in 1986 a few years after Epstein made “The Times of Harvey Milk,” which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

As a team, they are known for LGBTQ-themed work such as the Emmy Award-winning “The Celluloid Closet” and “Paragraph 175.” Their “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” also won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

 

“Glamorous” is now streaming on Netflix

“Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music” debuted June 27 on HBO and is now streaming on Max