Seven-time Tony Award-winning producer, fashion trailblazer and innovative performance artist Jordan Roth makes his television acting debut this week in FX’s The Shards, an alluring 1980s-set thriller based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 2023 bestselling novel, adapted by Ellis and Ryan Murphy. Portraying Steven Reinhardt on the series, the strikingly stylish right-hand man to Hollywood mogul Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley) and his erratic wife Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), Roth’s commanding performance is a revelation.
For the last eight years, Roth’s Met Gala looks have caught the attention of the world’s fashion media, with Roth sharing behind-the-scenes insights to his over two million followers across platforms on social media. He has walked runways from Paris Couture to New York Fashion Week and graced the covers of magazines such as Vogue Portugal, L’Officiel, Paper and Purple, and been lensed by legendary photographers like David LaChapelle, Steven Klein and Paolo Roversi.
Following 15 years as president of Jujamcyn Theaters, Roth now serves as creative director for ATG Entertainment. Roth’s producing career continues to see him champion shows that push the boundaries of Broadway including Moulin Rouge, Hadestown, Springsteen on Broadway, The Book of Mormon, Into the Woods, Kinky Boots, Clybourne Park, Hair and Angels in America, which broke records as the most Tony-nominated play in Broadway history. Upcoming, he is a producer of the new musical, Galileo, set to open this fall at the Shubert Theatre.
Having successfully nurtured and platformed the creative output of others, the New York dwelling Princeton and Columbia graduate is now forging his own unconventional performance career. Last summer saw Roth debut his critically acclaimed performance piece Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty at the Louvre in Paris, which will be celebrated in a forthcoming book. Situated at the intersection of performance, art and fashion, his multi-disciplinary practice of “narrative fashion performance” explores the dynamics of beauty, transformation and how we see and experience being seen. Roth was subsequently invited by Performance Space New York to unveil a new piece for the 2026 Venice Biennale at Palazzo Dei Fiori.
Ahead of the premiere of the first two episodes of The Shards on FX and Hulu on Wednesday, August 5th, Jordan Roth speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about making his return to his first love of acting, his approach to playing Steven, his creative input into creating the character’s ravishing look, and his passion for “the gestalt of Mame“.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: many people will know you as a Tony-winning theatre producer and as a fashion icon, but how does performance fit into things for you?
Jordan Roth: “I always intended to be an actor. As a child, as a young person growing up, that’s where my passion was, where my training was, and what I always dreamt about. Soon after college, where I studied both philosophy and theatre, I came back to the city and I was performing in a couple of of shows. Then I started producing, which came about because I found this show that friends were developing. The first conversation was about me acting in it and I was like, I don’t know if I want to be in it, but I feel like it should be happening on a bigger scale and with different design. So I actually started producing it before I even called myself a producer. That show ended up being The Donkey Show, which ran for six years Off-Broadway and took me down a new path not of my own planning. It was just how things evolved, but that path was very satisfying and very meaningful to me for many years until I started to miss my own creativity.”
“It was very meaningful to me to facilitate other people’s creativity and then there came a point where I thought I need to express my own. The first door out—or in—for me was fashion. Fashion really can be, for all of us, a daily practice of self-expression. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You don’t need to be hired. You don’t need to be accepted. You don’t need to do anything but find how your body wants to feel today, which will be different than how you want to feel tomorrow and the beauty is you can change it.”
“My exploration of fashion was really a primer of the creative pump. What I found myself doing in fashion was expressing character and performance. I want to clarify that for me the word performance is not about artifice, it is not pretend, it is an excavating, a bringing forth of self. It is all these different facets of me that I get to explore and that brought me to my performance artwork. I started to understand over many years of development and exploration that what I was doing was more than just getting dressed. I started to long for the the artistic platform to make these performances, the first of which became my performance at the Louvre, followed by my performance at the Venice Biennale.”
“This body of performance art is continuing to develop in really meaningful ways for me. I’m actually coming out this fall with a book about the Louvre performance which dives into the beauty that we created together, but also the references. Every piece of that performance is a reference to an object in the Louvre collection or architecture of the Louvre. All of this was circling my first love and passion of acting and Ryan Murphy had been following along on my Instagram and seeing what I was doing over many years. Then one day Ryan sent me a DM on my Instagram saying, ‘I wrote you a part. Call me.'”
I think Ryan has great instincts for casting. When you received that DM what was your reaction and what drew you in as you learnt more about The Shards and the role he was offering you?
“It was an instant dream come true and I have never dialed the phone faster. I called him and he shared with me The Shards and how he was thinking about Steven. It is quite a departure from how he is explored in the book, but everything in the show that is not in the book is very much in the spirit of the book. Ryan has given so much of himself to Steven and as we were going along I kept reading these scripts and I thought, you are mainlining to my guts with these scenes. I am wildly grateful that Ryan saw what he saw and that he invited me on this extraordinary adventure with this cast, we are all so madly in love with each other. Everybody on the show is an extraordinary human and I can’t believe I get to work with them.”
You have such great scenes with all of the cast. I particularly loved your scenes with Evan Rachel Wood.
“She is divine.”
What can you share about your approach to Steven and was there anything specific that unlocked things for you or gave you a way into playing him?
“I was very lucky to work with several coaches and each of them gave me different doors into him; acting; movement; and voice. When Ryan called me, he said that we would find the look together and I thought, oh, that’s so nice of you to say, I know you don’t mean it, but that’s okay. But he did, he meant it. The clue he gave me was that he imagined Steven is looking to the runways of Europe. He’s looking to the music scene. He’s looking at all of these aesthetic and fashion references. This was before finding those references was so easy on Instagram and online, so the people who were scouring these references were the real devotees and the real artists of self.”
“We printed out every runway show from 1981 and did a deep dive into the New Romantics and New Wave and the whole fashion and music scene. That was about finding the silhouette. Steven has a very specific silhouette that really speaks to my body. Clothes speak very loudly to my body. My first impulse on the hair was thinking about David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth period; the red, the yellow, that beautiful swoop, this chic look. I was talking about that with Brent Lawler, who does my own hair, and a couple days later he sent me a message saying, ‘take a look at David Sylvian’. David Sylvian was the lead singer of the band Japan in the late 70s, early 80s, and Brent was so right, that is the Steven hair.”
“I wanted to test it out to make sure that it worked on my face before I pitched the idea. So Brent made a Steven wig and we played with it. I took pictures and I sent them over to production and they were like, ‘Yep, there’s Steven!’ I brought that wig to set and Valerie Jackson, who was our head of hair department, took care of this wig like it was her child. We changed the lace, we made it bigger, and Ryan wanted darker roots. It was very much the David Sylvian inspiration impulse that gave me a lot of Steven. Then our our wonderful costume designers Joshua Marsh and Serrita Coleman found his shoes. So by that point I had the head and I had the feet. The shoes and the silhouette gave me the walk and his physicality and it was the script that gave me his voice and his mouth. That all came to me through the words. He chews on his words. He speaks with his lips and his tongue and his pace is his own.”
“What I decided about Steven is that he takes things right up to the line before his hand is going to get slapped. So the heel is just that little bit higher. He’s not wearing a high heel, but it’s just a little higher than normal. Just before you say, ‘What the hell are you wearing?’ The hair is just a little bit larger. Kate Biscoe, who was our head of makeup department, created the face and we talked a lot about the idea of just going to that line and not any further, but definitely go to the line. Steven is not me. He says things I would never say. He does things I would never do. He doesn’t talk like me or walk like me or think like me, but I love him so much and the fact that I get to live in him is a blessing.”
At one point, Wes Bentley’s character Terry tells Steven that he couldn’t accompany him to Hollywood meetings because of the way he dresses and styles himself. Which is striking because as viewers we are used to seeing Steven look the way he does and it fits into the world of the show, but then all of a sudden he gets called out for it. He must have so much confidence in himself to be like, this is who I am and I’m walking through the world like this. What were your thoughts on that moment and is it something that resonated with you?
“That was one of the things I meant when I said that when I read the scripts I was like, Ryan is mainlining to my guts, because that is always the challenge and the fear. It’s a thing that I walk with in my life and it was really very meaningful to get to walk with it in someone else’s life, and in a different time. One of the things that I find so thrilling about what Ryan has done with this show—and what he does with all of his shows—is that he creates this 360 world and invites us to live in it. It is such a vibe and it’s so specific. This season we are in August, September, and October of 1981. That is totally different from 1984 and 1978. It is a particular moment in our culture, in our world, in our aesthetic development as humans, in our politics, in our economy, in our collective psyche, and he draws that in large ways and in minutely detailed ways. As an actor that did so much work for me and as a viewer it is extraordinary to drink in and step into.”
The music is such an essential part of this series. With the first couple of episodes especially it’s almost wall-to-wall needle drops of incredible 80s songs, a lot of which are referenced in the book.
“Bret Easton Ellis’ genius is that the voice of the book is the voice of the character of Bret and of the music of 1981. Those two audio streams are literal streams, rivers, that we sail down through the book. Ryan has woven those voices—the character of Bret’s narration and this musical character—in this adaptation. The music is really another character in the show. What he’s also woven in is the score, which is different from the pop songs that we hear and love. This aural tapestry is woven among Bret’s voice and the pop songs of the time and this new original score that is cueing our emotions, our fear, our sense of mystery, our sensuality, all of this emotional terrain that the show rides. Just listening to it is such a trip.”
I got to the end of the season and then found myself rewatching the first episode and enjoying all those details again; the voice-over, the songs, the score, the hair, the clothes, the production design. It’s so beautifully shot too.
“I totally agree. Jason McCormick, who’s our head DP, is so specific with the shots and the light and then there’s Ryan’s extraordinary aesthetic detail. There’s something so specific about the light and the color that is 1981, Los Angeles. It’s both the reality of it, but it’s also how we remember it being represented. Ryan is inviting us into this story, both through a reality and a memory, a personal memory as well as a collective memory, a cultural nostalgia. How we think about and remember that time, both through maybe our own experience, but also what we have seen of it. That’s a very sophisticated cultural viewpoint that he invites us to to experience.”
Lastly, what’s your favourite LGBTQ+ culture or person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you over the years?
“I will give you rapid-fire what what lands in my head at this moment: Mame; Harvey Fierstein; Robert Mapplethorpe; Yves Saint Laurent.”
Not enough people talk about Mame these days.
“Agreed. You know the song, “Open a New Window”, well, Mame was a window for me. I identified with Patrick and I identified with Mame. I was the Patrick to several Mames in my life and maybe I’m the Mame to other people. That iconography of character and spirit and style and wit is, in many ways, how we find ourselves, how we find our voice, our courage, our beauty, and our resilience.”
Is it always the musical version for you or do you include the Rosalind Russell movie?
“It’s all of the above. It’s the original movie. It’s the movie musical. It’s the stage musical. It’s the novel. It’s the cast recordings. It’s the gestalt. The gestalt of Mame is what we’ll call this!”
By James Kleinmann
The Shards premieres with two episodes on Wednesday, August 5th on FX, Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Follow Jordan Roth on Instagram @jordan_roth and follow The Shards @TheShardsFX.
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