Miss Benny Has Arrived

The north Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint on a Monday is sleepy, especially on an overcast September day the week after New York Fashion Week, but that doesn’t stop Miss Benny from turning a look. She shows up for our 5 p.m. date at the art cafe Happy Medium wearing a black loose-knit sweater she’s had since she was 16 over a red bra with pleather shorts, Miista boots, and a blue Telluride bandana tied at her waist. We pick out ceramics to paint — a catchall ring holder for her, a ludicrously capacious mug for me — and settle in to paint and yap about a particularly fertile creative period for her. Miss Benny is only 27 years old, but she’s entering her second act thanks to her turn in Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, which is sending tidal waves across the internet and film festivals around the world.

“I feel like I generally am getting a big reset in my life,” she tells me. “This is the first time I’ve been on camera as myself, because when I did Glamorous” — the short-lived 2023 Netflix series she starred on opposite Kim Cattrall — “I was in early, early transition. I wanted so badly to be a part of everything and feel like I had arrived. And with this, I was what I would consider to be fully formed. I had completed all my transition goals. I was in New York. I was in all these creative spaces I wanted to be in, and suddenly I was like, ‘OK, this is it. I’m finally introducing a version of myself to people that I really want them to meet.’”

It’s a long way from where she started. Benny was born and raised in Denton, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where devout Christianity was the overriding culture and heteronormativity was the currency. “When people talk about being religious as kids, they’re like, ‘It was so weird. I hated it.’ I’m like, ‘Not me. I was speaking in tongues. I wanted it to all be so real,’” she says. Still, it didn’t take long for her to bristle at her upbringing. “I came out of the gate wanting to be a girl before we were taught that was bad. I would tell all my friends, ‘Let’s play a game where I’m a girl all day,’ and everyone was fine with that,” Benny says. “Then as we got older, we were taught that was the wrong thing, and it became complicated.”

She had an outlet, at least, in acting — mostly commercials (Nerf and Goldfish, to be specific) that afforded her a degree of independence. She even almost signed a deal to become a Christian pop star (“If I had not been able to leave, I think I would have locked in and done that”), but instead she got scouted in an acting class to move to Los Angeles at 14 to pursue a bigger vision of stardom. Once there, though, she struggled to find her footing. “I was calling my agent in Texas being like, ‘Barbara, I need money.’ And she was like, ‘Will you work non-union?’ I was like, ‘I’ll put my ego aside,’” she says with a knowing giggle. “I was ahead for my age.” She picked up odd jobs wherever she could (“If I can learn it on YouTube, I can charge people to do it,” she recalls thinking) and worked as a makeup artist to pay the bills. It was her experience doing the latter that led to her big break: At a house party, she met television writer Jordon Nardino, who soon after created Glamorous — about a young makeup artist who gets a job working for a beauty mogul (Cattrall) — with Benny in mind. (She was working on the set of a Madison Beer video when she got the call about a pilot being built around her.)

All told, between pandemic delays and typical Hollywood development road blocks, the show took three years to achieve lift off. Behind the scenes, Benny was experiencing a metamorphosis of her own and privately transitioning. “I had to re-closet myself for the show because I was so paranoid they were going to fire me if I came out as trans,” she says. “Honestly, looking back, I could have probably asked for anything because they were so supportive. But I was like, ‘If you’ll let me be trans by the end of the season, we can make me the boy for the first half of the show, whatever.’ And they were like, ‘OK, cool.’”

Glamorous only lasted one season, but she ended up paying for her gender-affirming surgeries with the money she made from it. “And it all was because I was making videos and living my life, living my little truth,” she says of her career trajectory. “It’s funny because so many opportunities I’ve had have come because I was being myself and was charismatic in a public place.” She remembers a pivotal moment with Eva Longoria, who began directing the pilot episode of Glamorous: “She was like, ‘I would rather tame a tiger than paint stripes on a kitten.’ I was self-conscious about doing too much, and she was like, ‘Do too much. I would much rather have to pull you back.’ And now I try to follow that.”

Club Kid was another right place, right time blessing. In 2024, Jean Paul Gaultier invited her to a party in Los Angeles, where the cast of I Love LA would be in attendance. Benny and Odessa A’zion are pals, but the surprise of the night was her connection with Jordan Firstman. “Jordan walks in, sits across from me, and I do what I do best, which is be extremely homophobic to him,” Benny says. “And he loved it.”

He asked her what she was doing that October. Benny submitted a self-tape that was bitingly sarcastic and humorously confrontational. “In the tape, they asked for a fun story about going out, and mine, I think I was like, ‘I’m not telling a fun story back. Get over yourself. This feels like Scientology. Why do you want all these tapes of us telling you our dirt?’ And he responded to it, and so I ended up doing it.” At the time, Benny admits, she thought she was doing Firstman a favor by being in his little indie movie. Now, having seen both what it became and the acclaim around it, she’s glad she treated the whole thing so casually: “If I had known, I would have psyched myself out too much and been scared of losing it.”

Firstman stars as Peter, a New York party promoter who discovers he has a young son, Arlo, that he never knew about. Benny plays Almi, a regular on the scene who’s always around the hazy rooms that make up much of the movie. “I had a huge couple years of partying,” she says of her own self-discovery. “It was formative for me, and there were definitely low points. As you’re engaging with sex and substances for the first time, you’re obviously going to stumble a bit, and I was grateful to have the ability to fall on my face and still be accepted.” Established actors like Cara Delevingne, Diego Calva (Narcos: Mexico), and Kirby-Howell Baptiste (The Good Place) star alongside a litany of New York nightlife legends like Alaska Riley and Jonah Almost. Firstman “told all of them, ‘Miss Benny is not as much of a club kid as she used to be, so you’re going to have to help her understand how to do G,’” Benny says. “There was an artistic exchange we had amongst ourselves.” (They named their group chat “Queerdos” after a particularly scathing Letterboxd review of the movie that disparagingly referred to them as such.)

Their call times were often 10 p.m., with final scenes wrapping at 9 a.m. “The lines between partying and acting were so blurry, and it was really a unique experience,” Benny recalls. “Our producer, Alex Coco, also produced Anora. I remember when I saw Anora, I was so jealous of the fact that they had scenes where they would put the camera on and interact with people in the scene. I was like, ‘That’s probably so fun.’ Then, when we were shooting Club Kid, I had this moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re doing that.’”

She could feel the magic of what they were making before she even watched the final product on screen. “I used to think, ‘When you make a special project, how do you know it’s special? Are you ever wrong?’” she says. “And doing this, I felt it. It was an easy process, and at every point, it felt unique and cool.” Still, uncertainty about Benny’s next chapter gnawed at her. She was at dinner with a friend, essentially spiraling about her career — “I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s about to happen. I feel like either everything’s about to work out for me, or nothing’s going to happen. I don’t know if I should pivot.’” — when a group FaceTime came in from Firstman with some news: The movie was headed to Cannes.

There is a joke on the Gay Internet™ about people being so desperate to attend any party that they would attend the opening of a can and post “Thank you, Can!” to approximate influencer-level demand. The joke ends up in the film, but on set, Benny tells me, they had been loudly manifesting attending Cannes the whole time. The May festival, where A24 ultimately acquired Club Kid in a intense bidding war, is “one of the last glamorous things you can do in movie-making,” she says, and it lived up to her expectations: a whirlwind of dinners, parties, black cars, and yachts. Last month, Benny went to Colorado’s Telluride, the polar opposite of Cannes, at least in terms of glamour, where she wore flannels and jeans, bonded with Emma Stone, and felt like she was in Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls: “I was like, ‘This is a cartoon place.’”

While Benny casually free-hands four perfect yellow stars with a paintbrush, I ask her who her Mount Rushmore of actresses is — she answers Stone, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, and Viola Davis — and we get to talking about how “like most queer people, for me, an actress is a singular entity,” she says. “No one can do what actresses can do, and especially actresses as they appreciate over time.” She’s looking forward to tackling a role where she can perhaps wear a little more clothing. “I really, really want to be in something where I get to be a thoughtful woman. Even a period piece,” she says, or, as she puts it, “a woman in distress with no iPhone in her hands.” A draw toward normalcy has been showing up in other areas of her life, too. She now looks back at her upbringing in Texas with a softer gaze. “As I get older, weirdly, I miss the South so much,” she says. “All my friends are terrified, because they know that fundamentally in the next five years I’ll be pregnant in North Carolina or something.”

But Benny knows that her best roles are still ahead of her. “I strongly believe that I will start to do my dream jobs in about 15 years. I would say my dream role, where I think I will strive the most is as someone’s floozy mistress who’s drunk and angry. When I do American Hustle, it’s over, but I have to get there first.”

As the final shades of blue dry on Benny’s catchall plate, and my mug receives its final coat on my ladybugs and crudely drawn bird, a moment of earnestness settles in. “It generally feels like all the things that I ever wanted are now arriving to me,” she says. “Weirdly, in my life, I somehow get everything I want.”

Photography by Kevin LeBlanc using the Canon EOS R50 V