The Reinvention of Isaac Powell

Isaac Powell never intended to go by the three names by which, until now, he's largely been known. However fun and gay and artsy it is to throw around a triptych of important initials, the actor only started using his middle name, Cole, after realizing @isaacpowell was already taken on Instagram. Check his IMDb page, or the credits on the latest season of American Horror Story, in which he played a Robert Mapplethorpe type, and the middle name's already been dropped.

Is this the beginning of a rebrand? He sounds pretty lax about it, speaking via Zoom from his hotel balcony on the last day of an Art Basel Miami Beach trip last December. The French fashion label AMI had invited him to a "family dinner" celebrating a gallery collaboration with Magnum Photos and, though he hadn't worked with either company before, he was glad to be allowed further into the world of fashion he's been slowly but surely cracking, one well-curated thirst trap at a time. Though his editorial shoots and campaigns grow apace, including one for Altu photographed by Ryan McGinley and released at the end of last year, he says he doesn't feel like a model: "It's an extension of what I do when I'm working; whether that's embodying the character or the essence of the clothes, there's always some kind of a story that's unfolding."

Powell's current story, which he told me a few weeks shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, is one of reflecting on past and future. "I was probably a sophomore in high school when my father sat me down and told me to write out a list of ten goals and prioritize them. In college, when I realized I'd spent five years seriously training for this industry, I said I needed to put at least five years into it," he says. Just two months after graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, his career took off when he booked a lead role in the first Broadway revival of Once on This Island just over five years ago.

His latest project is NYC, the eleventh season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck's American Horror Story anthology series. Powell lived in the West Village while shooting the season, which takes place amid the gay subcultures of eighties New York, frequenting iconic queer hotspots like Julius' and the Christopher Street Piers and immersing himself in his character's world through the era's gay literature, soaking up the seminal Dancer from the Dance and works by Edmund White, as well as Patti Smith's Just Kids and other texts on Mapplethorpe. Powell plays Theo, a bold, young photographer as bound to leather as he is to a love triangle with the characters played by Zachary Quinto and Charlie Carver. Stage legends Joe Mantello, Patti LuPone, Sandra Bernhard, and Denis O'Hare round out the cast—an ensemble Powell says it was hard not to fanboy around.

"I might've gotten a little sappy when we were on Fire Island because we were all living in a house together there during some of the shoot and it was just so special to me," he beams. "Five years ago, I wrote out a list of all the people in the industry that I looked to for inspiration and proof that I could do this, and a lot of the names were people who I wound up working with on this job. That wasn't lost on me."

For Powell, the ideal next half-decade sees him starring in and producing his own material, which might hopefully sate his desire to feel personally invested in the work he does. "I'm looking for something that's going to engage me more creatively, where I'm raising the stakes and putting my name on the line," he says. "I don't know that I've had that, to be honest. I guess the closest I've come was when I was doing West Side Story on Broadway a few years ago. I felt really, really invested in that because we were taking a lot of liberties with the material, so I felt like I was taking ownership of that role in a new way. My relationship with the director was extremely collaborative, and I felt like I was rising to what that experience demanded of me in a way that I was proud of."

Director Ivo van Hove's 2020 revival of the classic musical might go down as one of the most contested reimaginings in history, cutting the action to an intermission-less 105 minutes, heavily relying on onstage camerawork, shedding "I Feel Pretty," and refocusing on the themes of police brutality creeping around the story's margins. The production did not reopen after the pandemic temporarily shut down live theater. "What we were doing with that show was extraordinarily ambitious, and you don't see people taking big swings on Broadway like that anymore," Powell argues passionately. "What we were doing was theater in the truest sense—pushing boundaries and experimenting—and for that, I'm extremely proud. We didn't just mount another production of West Side Story. I don't think anybody could look at that production and call it boring—I'm proud of that and I will defend it to my grave."

The Greensboro, North Carolina, native is superstitious, so he holds back on details around the types of projects he wants in the future, but shares that there is a screen-to-stage transfer he's envisioning as a star vehicle for himself, which he'd also want to produce. (He doesn't often love these adaptations but cites two exceptions to his rule: The Band's Visit and Legally Blonde—the latter of which he saw twice in one day on his first trip to New York City, inspired by his love for the MTV reality competition The Search for Elle Woods.) In the meantime, he appeared in two films, Past Lives and Cat Person, which just premiered at Sundance, and was recently announced as part of the cast of Sam Mendes's upcoming comedy pilot The Franchise.

Unhurried as he waits for the next phases of his career to fall into place, the actor says he's excited for the personal, rather than professional, advancements he'll feel ready to make as he approaches thirty. "I want to settle down and have a life," he says, explaining his desire to own a house and get involved in its landscaping—a passion inspired by his father. "I'm not ready to pack it all up and retire, by any means, but I want to feel settled in my life."

A young actor—let alone a gay one in New York—who's not afraid of maturing?

"Fuck that," he says. "Not at all. I really don't give a fuck about my skin sagging or getting wrinkles or any of that. When I look to my thirties or beyond, I'm excited for the settling that will happen inside, feeling like I've really arrived in my adulthood with a stronger sense of myself. My golden birthday is the thirtieth, so I've always thought of it as a destination to arrive at, rather than something to be feared."

American Horror Story: NYC is now streaming on Hulu.

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