Pose star Jeremy Pope is staking out the kind of career rarely before seen on stage and screen. The 28-year-old openly gay actor has achieved a meteoric rise to fame primarily by playing queer characters — and his next project is no exception.
As Variety reported earlier this week, the actor will appear opposite Gabrielle Union in The Inspection, an A24 drama based on the life of its filmmaker Elegance Bratton, a Marine veteran who was kicked out of his childhood home for being gay. The news comes hot on the heels of the Pose series finale, which brought Pope’s season-long turn on the FX drama to a close.
In The Inspection, Pope will play a character based on Bratton, a young gay Black man who enlists in the army and seeks the approval of his mother, played by Union. Dear White People producer Effie T. Brown will oversee the project.
“Elegance brings authenticity, heart, and a fresh perspective to this compelling autobiographical story and we are thrilled to have Jeremy Pope and Gabrielle Union on board to bring it to life,” Brown said in a statement.
Pope made his Broadway debut playing a queer boarding school student in Choir Boy, written by Oscar-winning Moonlight scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney. He then became the sixth actor in Tony Awards history to be nominated for two performances in the same season, after securing a nod for his role in The Temptation’s musical Ain’t Too Proud.
The actor has also worked his way into Ryan Murphy’s television universe, first on the Netflix series Hollywood, in which he plays an aspiring (and ultimately successful) gay screenwriter. On Pose, which Murphy co-created, Pope portrayed a dreamy love interest for Mj Rodriguez’s Blanca.
Pope numbers among a rising generation of actors, including Generation’s Justice Smith and Eurphoria’s Hunter Schafer, who have kicked off their careers openly identifying as queer and made their names playing queer roles.
Bratton has likewise built his career telling Black, queer stories. The Inspection will mark Bratton’s feature debut, though it’s not the first film that he’s drawn from personal experience to make. His documentary Pier Kids, which took home an Independent Spirit Award in 2019, follows homeless queer and trans youth around New York’s Christopher Street Pier.
The Inspection is set to start filming this summer.
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