Rachel Bloom has long been a bleeding-heart liberal theater geek. Need proof? Aside from the plethora of progressive issues broken down on her musical comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, her “HOLY SH*T (You've Got to Vote)” Funny or Die spot from November 2016 called our then soon-to-be president an “orange talking S.T.D.,” a “garbage fire,” and “human syphilis,” just to name a few.
“Politics is a tricky thing because I don’t want to preach to the choir,” Bloom told Vanity Fair outside Radio City Music Hall before the 71st annual Tony Awards on Sunday. “That Trump video was very much meant for the choir, and it was meant to kick the asses of the people who were already in the choir but too lazy to stand up and join the choir.”
With beyond-the-choir viewers in mind, the 30-year-old Golden Globe winner is wary about doing something so politically on-the-nose again.
“It takes a lot if you’re actually going to make a video to try to convince people to your way of thinking, and we’re so polarized,” she said. “The other side right now, we think they’re horrible, and they think we’re horrible. No one wants to be the bad guy; everyone thinks they’re the good guy. I think part of any sort of healing is to stop being so angry at each other—and the amount of anger is insane.”
Bloom knows that anger firsthand. Though her bubbly turn as last night’s Tony Awards pinch hitter host backstage has Broadway lovers calling for Bloom to host the whole shebang next year, the pre-show red carpet had her getting emotional for things other than theater.
“I’ve been on the receiving end of this hatred,” she said, recalling a recent musical number she did for Bill Nye’s highly anticipated Netflix return, Bill Nye Saves the World, that spurred the most barbarous online harassment she experienced since her 2015 breakout. The song? “My Sex Junk,” a number from Episode 109 of the science series meant to humorously highlight “how gender is non-binary.”
While she didn’t write that 2.5-minute tune, Bloom agreed to do it as “a big fan” of Bill Nye. “I was happy with it. It was just a silly song . . . and, honestly, [I] forgot that I did it, and then it came out on Netflix, and I got eviscerated,” she said. “I got eviscerated by the alt-right. And it’s something no one else around me noticed because it was only stuff directed to me on Twitter. But it was, like, ‘Kill yourself.’ It was death threats. Someone found my mother’s Facebook and wrote about [the content of] her Facebook. They found a letter that my father wrote to the local newspaper in 1997 [and called] him an unfit father.”
Bloom now cites the backlash as a “wake-up call” to “the level of anger and depression that much of the country feels,” but it still hit her hard.
“It was crazy how out of control it felt,” she said. “I think up until then, I had been in sort of a liberal theater-kid bubble, and it really affected me. I mean, it’s hard to go on your Twitter and have hundreds of people tell you that you should kill yourself. It’s fucking hard.”
Despite the online vitriol, Bloom was quick to acknowledge an understanding of perspectives different from her own—just as she hopes she and her colleagues’ continued work in Hollywood will enlighten others to theirs.
“I think that part of what the other side is reacting to is the sudden swell of awareness that we’ve had in the past couple years of how far we have to go as far as representation, as far as the way women are treated, as far as the way people of color are treated, L.G.B.T. people are treated. And I think that people are freaking out because it’s so much change so quickly,” she said. “The way that you counterbalance it is to keep showing the stories and the point of views of people that we have not seen before. Yes, the casting process is a big part of inclusion, but it starts at the bottom.”
That means allotting entry-level positions to people of varying socioeconomic backgrounds and tapping talent for writers’ rooms that reflect the characters on-screen. Bloom, for one, has a “majority female” team of writers for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and a Filipino writer to chart love interest Josh Chan’s arc. “That’s how you tell these stories: You get people knowledgeable about [them],” she said.
And when it comes to more prospective clashes online with the alt-right, Bloom had a better idea of how they should spend their time. “At the end of the day, we were all, like, forced into existence on this planet. Let’s just work together and hug each other and get pancakes.”
