“Anything’s Possible” is Billy Porter’s feature-film debut as a director. It’s a romantic comedy about a Black trans girl navigating her senior year of high school — a light-hearted yet poignant story about being out, growing up and becoming the person you were meant to be.
But for residents of Pittsburgh, where the story is set, it will inevitably also be a film about Pittsburgh. And that’s just as Steel City native Porter intended.
Porter has said that from the moment he learned that screenwriter Ximena García Lecuona had set the story in Pittsburgh, he knew this was a film he was destined to make. But while shooting it here last summer, the award-winning actor and singer known for his red-carpet fashion statements took things a step further.
“I've made it a love letter to Pittsburgh,” Porter said in an interview via Zoom from the West Coast, a week before the film’s premiere on Friday, July 22 on Amazon. “Anything’s Possible” stars Eva Reign as Kelsa and Abubakr Ali as Khal, her classmate and love interest.
Pittsburgh is a character
“Anything’s Possible” includes such cinematic touchstones as an aerial shot of the Point and the Downtown skyline as seen from a city bus emerging from the Fort Pitt Tunnel. But it also showcases, under a fictitious name, Downtown’s Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, which Kelsa and her friends attend. (CAPA is Porter’s alma mater, though in his day it was housed elsewhere.) There are not one but two scenes set in Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens, and another set at The Andy Warhol Museum.
But for all that, one sequence might stand out for some long-time Pittsburghers. It takes place in a classroom, where students are learning about the city’s modern history. In quick succession, Porter has the high-schoolers read aloud a litany of Pittsburgh mayors from the 1980s and ’90s — Richard Caliguiri, Sophie Masloff, Tom Murphy — whom Porter credits with successfully guiding the city through the hard times that followed the demise of Big Steel.
“We did not blame nameless, faceless immigrants for stealing our jobs,” Porter said in the interview. “We made a pivot and did something different for our city. And now there's medical — top five in the world. The colleges, the arts, the tech, you know — called the East Coast Silicon Valley. We did that.”
That's no random shout-out. The scene also resonates with the film’s themes, as Kelsa comes of age and clarifies what she wants out of life, despite a sometimes-messy romantic relationship with her first boyfriend and the inevitable (for a contemporary rom-com) social-media scandal.
As Porter puts it, the film is all about “taking responsibility for your own lives. At all times. And not putting the blame on somebody else.”
Porter's path
Porter, 52, has his own story of self-actualization. He grew up in East Liberty and Homewood and graduated from CAPA and the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. His Pittsburgh bona fides even include a few summers with the in-house entertainment troupe at Kennywood. With his exceptional vocal talents, he found success on Broadway in shows such as “Grease” and “Miss Saigon” and started a solo recording career. But he says that roles for an openly gay Black man were limited. Moreover, he wanted his work to give a voice to marginalized communities.
It was a long road, but his breakout came in 2012, when he originated the role of Lola in Kinky Boots, the hit Broadway musical about a British shoe factory that begins crafting footwear for drag queens. And it seems the flow of accolades has not ceased since: a Tony (among other awards) for “Kinky Boots,” a Grammy for the cast album and an Emmy for playing Pray Tell on FX’s “Pose,” set in New York’s gay ballroom scene in the ’80s and ’90s.
In addition to being a reliable show-stopper on red carpets, Porter has also emerged as a forceful spokesperson on human-rights issues, as evidenced by his winning this year’s Outfest Achievement Award and his scorching denunciation of the U.S. Supreme Court during his acceptance speech.
Porter returns to Pittsburgh frequently, and not only to sing or act. This spring alone, he was grand marshal at the big Pittsburgh Pride parade, a commencement speaker at Carnegie Mellon University and the headlining author at the inaugural Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books (where he discussed his 2021 memoir, “Unprotected”). He said coming back last year as director of a feature film was “redemptive.”
“It felt like a gift I was able to return,” he said. “Pittsburgh and all of my mentors and teachers and colleagues and friends and chosen family, all of those energies that raised me, many of them are a part of this film, and it was wonderful to be able to go back and give back, and I want to continue to be able to do that.”
More hometown love
The list of Porter’s Pittsburgh people who appear onscreen in “Anything’s Possible” is long. Most prominently, local stage legend Lenora Nemetz, whom Porter considers his mentor, plays the flamboyant art teacher Miss Kidd. Smaller roles went to Ken Lutz, who was Porter’s middle-school music and theater instructor; Maria Becoates-Bey and Miriam Luba, his friends since their teen years; and Billy Hartung, another theater kid from those days and a fellow student at Pittsburgh’s Center for Theater Arts. “You know, his parents would drive me home in their pickup truck all the way to the other side of town after dance class on Tuesday night,” he said.
In a nod to another Pittsburgh high school, Porter attended, Porter’s best friend, Walt McCready, plays a teacher named Mr. Allderdice.
For most viewers, of course, the Pittsburgh connections won’t be as important as the film’s message.
“The subject matter is something that I really believe in,” said Porter. “And with the way the world is, I like to put good energy out into it through my art. Art heals; art moves needles forward.”
Porter’s sensitive handling of the script is evident throughout. He acknowledges that the film is something of an homage to the John Hughes films of his youth, like “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club,” but from his own perspective.
“As a Black gay man, while I loved those movies, I had to superimpose myself onto those characters because none of them looked like me, and none of them really reflected me,” said Porter. “And so now we get to take that genre and populate that world with people that look like what the world looks like now.”
While one character, a friend of Khal’s, is transphobic, Eva’s world, including her fiercely protective mother (played by Porter’s fellow CMU grad Renée Elise Goldsberry), is largely supportive. Reign, the young trans actor who plays Kelsa, liked that the film was a positive depiction of trans life rather than the traumatic depiction often offered by mass media.
“Growing up, I never thought I’d ever see a story that centered on a happy trans person,” she said in press materials. “[T]his felt different. This role was centered on joy.”
“Through Kelsa, I learned it is okay to be happy. I also learned that love is possible,” Reign added. “Playing this role, I just felt so free. Kelsa gives Black trans women the right to not only love but to own their freedom.”
In one scene in the film, Kelsa says she hates it when people call her “brave” just because she’s trans. She thinks it’s self-congratulatory of them. It’s a moment Porter felt personally.
“You know, it's like, I'm just being myself, and other people thrust their fears and insecurities on us,” he said. “Don't worry about me. I'm just being me.”
