Dear Evan Hansen Trailer: Ben Platt on Going Back to High School, One Last Time

Ben Platt is going to tell the truth: He’s outgrowing the role in Dear Evan Hansen that made him famous. At 27, Platt is still a young man. But as time goes by, he looks less and less like the anxiety-racked high school senior who tells a well-meaning lie that spirals out of control—especially now that he’s playing the part on film, with close-ups and high-def, rather than from the distance of a Broadway stage.

Platt and director Stephen Chbosky both hope the rawness of Platt’s performance in the movie version of the musical, out September 24, still connects with audiences as deeply as his Tony-winning work in the theater. “You just have to hear him sing the songs,” Chbosky said. “His understanding of the character is so complete and so profound. I couldn’t imagine anybody else playing it. It’s his part. I felt very strongly about it. And to me it was never even a consideration.”

Platt’s run in Dear Evan Hansen, from workshops in 2014 until his final bow in late 2017, made him a modern Broadway legend. For eight emotionally grueling performances a week, he put on a cast and opened his heart, breaking down in such intense and emotional ways that some onlookers legitimately worried about his well-being. The New York Times said he “wrecks himself onstage,” while Time Out New York said Platt gave “one of the greatest leading male performances…in a musical.” The show won five Tony Awards in addition to Platt’s win for best actor, including best musical, best book, and best original score.

When Platt left the show, there was already talk of a film adaptation; after all, much of its creative team had already being drawn into Hollywood projects. Dear Evan Hansen’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul had written songs and lyrics for The Greatest Showman and La La Land, winning an Oscar for “City of Stars” from the latter. Steven Levenson, who adapted his own book for the film adaptation, was the showrunner of FX’s Fosse/Verdon and also adapted the musical Tick, Tick… Boom! for the upcoming Lin-Manuel Miranda–directed film. 

The prevailing question was not just how to put Dear Evan Hansen onscreen, but how to make the movie with the actor who poured so much of himself into the part. That meant moving fast, Platt told Vanity Fair.

“I think everybody obviously had in their minds that I wasn’t going to stay teen-adjacent forever,” Platt said. “The need to get it done was a little urgent. Then of course the pandemic happened, and I kind of assumed that was that—it would be a no-go, and by the time the pandemic was over, I’d have outgrown it.”

Instead, Universal Pictures made it one of its first new projects to launch after filmmaking work started up again in late summer. Platt started shooting in September, just before his most recent birthday. “Much to my pleasant surprise, Universal seemed to be really hell-bent on making it, and specifically making it with me,” he said.

That meant Platt had to put himself back through the emotional and physical ringer. “On the one hand, it was much easier than performing in the show because obviously I wasn’t having to recreate the entire piece” each day, he said. “But physically it was very much the same experience. I’d lost about 15 pounds and did a very specific diet, grew my hair out, and was shaving to make sure that I didn’t look like I had five o’clock shadow all the time, you know. I was just stripping myself into being a teenager for the last time. For what is hopefully the last time.”

While the movie will be an introduction to Dear Evan Hansen for the vast majority of viewers, who never saw it onstage, the project is a goodbye for Platt. “I certainly was hesitant at the beginning,” he said. “The legacy of the stage performance has really changed my life, and to jeopardize that legacy in any way is a very scary thing. But I think in the back of my mind, I always felt [that] I’m going to want to show this to my children one day, and I’m going to want this immortalized.”

Evan Hansen isn’t nearly as brutally honest as Platt. As the newly released trailer shows, this story centers on a kid whose therapist has given him the assignment of writing letters to himself, addressing his fears, hopes, and insecurities. 

A classmate named Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan, who understudied the role on Broadway) steals one of the letters and later takes his own life. That boy’s parents (played in the film by Amy Adams and Danny Pino) mistake the letter Evan wrote for their son’s final words, addressed to a kid they assume was his close friend. Evan lets them believe this because he thinks it brings them comfort—but the confusion and lies soon pile up, leading to greater heartbreak.

Complicating the situation further is shy Evan’s crush on the boy’s sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), and the expectations of his own mother (Julianne Moore) and friend Alana (Amandla Stenberg). “One of the byproducts of the pandemic was that all of these fantastic actors were also around and wanting badly to go to work on something,” Platt said.

Chbosky’s 1999 novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, became a touchstone for a generation of teenagers; so did his 2012 adaptation of the book. Working on Dear Evan Hansen meant joining his two specialities: Chbosky also wrote the screenplays for both the 2005 film version of the musical Rent and the live-action version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He was eager to make this his next film after his 2017 adaptation of the middle-grade book Wonder. “I literally spent my career either writing musical screenplays or making sensitive movies for young people,” he said. “Ever since I was a villager in Anatevka for Fiddler on the Roof when I was a junior in high school, I have had the musical bug.”

He saw Dear Evan Hansen as a chance to explore themes of forgiveness, atonement, and acceptance in a time of anger and widespread suffering. “It’s pervasive—a lot of the mental health issues, a lot of the struggles that people are going through, whether it’s depression or it’s anxiety, or whether it’s clinical or sociological, since we’ve all been through this unbelievable time,” he said. “When I take on a movie, I want it to do some good in the world. I want to help those people who might feel isolated, who might feel lonely or exposed.”

That doesn’t mean Evan Hansen, the character, gets off easy. Platt said the film version includes new scenes that might satisfy those who felt the musical didn’t grapple enough with the fallout of his lie. “I think the main change, other than the fact that there are two new songs, is a kind of extended third act of the film in which we get to see a little bit more of Evan’s repentance and redemption and the work that he does subsequently to make amends and really get to know who Connor was and try to help the family heal,” Platt said. “He’s not, like, quite as off the hook as he is in the musical, where you’ve been sitting in a theater for two and a half hours and you’re kind of ready to wrap it up.”

He cautioned that purists need to prepare themselves for some structural changes. “I think a lot of people, particularly musical-theater fans, are just looking for as close of a page-to-page adaptation as possible and can feel kind of betrayed if anything is different. But to make a great film, you have to be willing to adjust and shift,” Platt said. “I think there’s nothing major gone that anyone’s going to miss. All of the major beats and all of the favorite songs are very much intact, and all of the characters are even more developed.”

 One of those characters is Stenberg’s Alana. “I’m really excited for people to get a deeper look into her and maybe understand more why she and Evan had this interesting friendship,” Platt said.

Even Platt’s powerhouse delivery has changed to some degree. “It becomes a lot more about demodulating the performance and grounding it much closer to the floor, and keeping things a little bit more nuanced and suggestive rather than broadcasting to the back of the house—which was my main task in terms of translating the performance,” Platt said.

Viewers may notice, too, that the trailer isn’t heavy on song and dance. Chbosky said that was intentional, a signal that this is not the traditional foot-stomping, sing-along kind of musical. “You could call it a drama with songs,” the director said. “You’re there, you’re at the dining room table, and suddenly there’s a song—but it feels seamless. It’s the reason why it works so beautifully onstage. It’s not trying to have these big numbers. It’s trying to just be very real and very emotional and very authentic to what people go through.”

After running the gamut of emotion for so long with this role, what Platt went through with the movie was a kind of graduation. “It was very cathartic to put a final stamp on each scene and each song as we went along and say goodbye to it individually,” he said, “and really know that this time, for sure—without the, like, looming promise of an adaptation—that this was going to really be the last time.”

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