Ezra Miller’s head is bowed as they roll up the breakfast spliff. When the actor – who uses they/them pronouns in a pointed refusal to be gendered or identified in any category – turns, their long strands of hair whirl away to reveal three dots under their eye, drawn on in deep wine-coloured eyeliner. ‘Weird times,’ they say as a salutation, and rise to hug me.

‘Three dots could mean so many things,’ Miller says of their make-up, sitting down on a stool at the kitchen counter of a suite at West Hollywood’s Palihouse hotel. ‘Any three on a plane, the agency, The Third Man, the third polka dancer akin to the third polka dot.’

I’m not sure exactly what everything means, but it sounds cool, so I nod my head along to the rhythm of Miller’s riff. Miller’s quarters at the Palihouse are bare, almost cold. Their publicist slinks off, somewhere off-screen, but in acoustic vicinity. It’s unclear why – Miller is one of the most outspoken celebrities in recent times, and it doesn’t seem as though a publicist is going to muzzle them. It’s as quiet as a spa, with a nice view out over West Hollywood from the top floor, away from the bustle of the street.

© Jeff Bark

There is rustling in another room, which seems to be caused by at least two other people, but Miller doesn’t say a word about who they are with. Over the course of an hour and a half, we don’t speak much about the polycule relationships – that is, relationships formed by clusters of non-monogamous individuals – that Miller famously opined on to a writer from Playboy. From that interview and others, shared far and wide on social media, we’ve got to know Miller as someone who grew up in suburban North Jersey, whose mother is a modern dancer who encouraged Miller to grow their creativity. We’ve learned that they started singing in Philip Glass operas aged six and went on to perform in the Metropolitan Opera before turning to acting; that they smoke joints and play in a band called Sons of an Illustrious Father.

That’s all well-trodden territory. What today’s encounter with Miller lacks in breaking news is more than made up for in style. What Miller delivers is almost akin to a performance, one that’s as committed as the close-to-the-bone characters they have embodied in movies. Somewhere along the way, after we agree that time is a construct and after the spliff (made of cigarette guts, high grade cannabis, and sprinkled with potent THC wax), we get on to the topic of colonialism, and how the settlers and conquerors needed to suppress healers and artists in order to stay in power.

‘We [actors and artists] are all practitioners of the various works of magic and medicine, storytelling and ritual,’ Miller says. ‘Native people with these powers and idiosyncrasies, queer people, people with different abilities, neurodiverse characters.’

© Jeff Bark

Miller goes on to connect the past with the present, talking about the colonisers around the world who violently snuffed out native dwellers’ rich ceremonial traditions of storytelling. ‘People related to the elements,’ Miller says. ‘They told stories with them to heal with light and sound in dark spaces where certain snacks were often consumed. Much like a movie theatre.’

This is the way they speak, eloquent and rhythmic. It’s both wonderful and terrifying to realise the person you’re sitting next to has been improvising as a part of their life for so long that they have an almost limitless grasp of English. Miller uses language to twist and turn throughout sermons that somehow both explain and avoid the topics of entertainment, acting, and what it means to be an artist.

There is no metric to the importance Miller plays in the world of ‘queer iconography’ (a label that Miller eschews, as even ‘queer’ is a label to them), since they don’t fiddle with social media. Yet Miller’s fans are zealous lovers, sharing GIFs of the actor’s every move. No wonder: the fair, fawn-like creature that sits next to me flashes cheekbones that would make Patti Smith blush and Angelina Jolie cower. The fans admire Miller’s beauty and openness – many have called Miller a ‘queer icon’ – but also their unpredictable early works, namely the school shooter horror movie We Need to Talk about Kevin and the MTV production of Stephen Chbosky’s twee scripture The Perks of Being A Wallflower.

And yet, Miller’s recent output – as the fast-and-equally-piquant Flash in the DC Comics Justice League films and as Credence Barebone, a powerful and unpredictable wizard villain in the Harry Potter verse’s Fantastic Beasts films – is almost ordinary. Miller is currently filming a 10-hour CBS All Access mini-series based on Steven King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand – King’s book was published in 1978, but could now be read as a sly forewarning of the coronavirus outbreaks. And then there’s the Flash standalone that is slated to happen in 2022.

All fairly entrenched in the mainstream, it might be noted, for someone who claims not to believe in the presuppositions of gender and time and space. Perhaps it is the ordinariness of those roles that beckons the masses into Miller’s own multiverse. Miller may not be remotely interested in being like, for example, their Fantastic Beasts co-star Eddie Redmayne, telling Ellen they’re pinching themselves about the opportunities they’ve been given or dutifully praising their director.

‘I am clandestine,’ Miller says, savouring each syllable of the pronouncement. ‘People do not understand me. I don’t intend them to, right? I want a certain amount of confusion and I’m comfortable sharing that. I have plans that not a soul, even in my closest spheres, know of. I mean, I tell stories in a lot of ways; I’m doing a lot of different types of work at once. They all interrelate. Some of them use my public image, some of them don’t. My prerogative is service. I’m here to do what I can for everybody I can do it for.’

A big part of that service is to express themselves on red carpets. Miller is particularly brilliant here, whether wearing Fenty Beauty at a Beijing premiere for Justice League, showing up to a Saint Laurent fashion show in leopard-print booty shorts with the word SLUT scrawled on their cheek in lipstick, or showing up to the Met Gala with five extra photorealistic eyes painted on in such a way that you have to make sure no one’s dosed you with DMT if you look at photos of them for too long.

Miller is a part of a new wave of entertainers – Billy Porter, Cody Fern and Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness among them – that sends gender-binary tabloids into paroxysms of confusion with lavish dresses and expressive make-up. It’s hard to imagine the previous generation – the Matt Damons and Leonardo DiCaprios – making similar style choices. For Miller, it seems to be not just a provocation, but a function of their mysticism.

© Jeff Bark

‘Look, when I say “Call me, Ms. Tickle,” and that’s m-s dot space t-i-c-k-l-e – you’ve gotta spell puns out for written interviews – I mean that you cling to a cliff that makes you feel better,’ he says. ‘I know the abyss looks scarier than the cliff, but if there’s a binary to note, it's the choice between pain and disconnect in this life. You are here to suffer. If you try to avoid that reality, you will aggravate it immensely.’

‘Straightness and cis-ness and whiteness and racism, as in the belief in race, physical appearance as a determining factor for fucking anything, including ethnicity, ethnography – these are all like the circus, the carnival, the Hollywood instead of all the different storytelling practices,’ Miller continues, on a slowly building roll. ‘All these things are relatively recent colonial inventions.’

‘The idea of the LGBTQIA plus plus plus ad infinitum community are not new,’ Miller says, growing animated as they speak. ‘These conceptions of gender roles – that's what’s new.’ It’s an interesting theory, the idea that queerness in historical terms precluded the oppression of it. Miller presses on: ‘In Hawaii, there is a word, Mā hū , which almost [translates as] “that which is becoming”. Like an idol not quite formed. In Hawaiian native understanding, everyone has kū[male spirit] and hina [female spirit]. Everyone is trans.’

I’ve read similar things about genderless beings in other Native American cultures, like the Chumash people of the Southwestern US. When I bring their culture up, Miller emphatically punches the table as if too excited to contain that I’m following what they’re saying.

‘We’re not fighting for equality,’ Miller says. ‘None of these conflicts against systems of oppression are fights for equality. They are fights for accurate regard of supremacy. We’re better at sex than y’all. We’re better at art. We’re better at warfare. These are things carried in the old understandings of so-called, whatever-you-want-to-call-it: non-binary, queer, genderqueer, trans, gay, lesbian. Just like the neurodiverse peoples, these people are all sacred beings, superior to other beings.’ Miller whispers towards the end of this spiel for dramatic effect, before launching into another treatise on how, just as martial arts tradition teaches that the only enemy is yourself, those same oppressors are really only oppressing themselves. They conclude with an exasperated tone. ‘Get it together, people.’

We wrap up the talk with some light discussion about post-Trump society (‘[the] apocalypse some fear is the paradise others await’) and night terrors when they were a kid (‘Sleep paralysis demons would just plague me’). As I get up to roll out, a few room service carts are rolled in, and Miller starts to pick off them. As I’m walking away, as if on cue, Miller calls after me. ‘Hey!’ I turn. They grin. I hear it coming before they even part their lips. ‘Don’t listen to me. I change my mind all the time.’ Weird times, indeed.

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