Name: Jaquel Spivey
Hometown: Raleigh, North Carolina
Current role: Damian Hubbard in Mean Girls
Teen Vogue: If you could be the main character in any TV show or movie that’s not your own, who would you be and why?
Jaquel Spivey: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt because it's my favorite TV show, and it's also from the mind of Tina Fey. I love that show so much. I was praying in high school when it was on, like let’s give Titus [Andromedon] a nephew or a brother. Just ‘cause I think Tituss [Burgess] is so perfect for that role, I can’t step into it. Nobody can.
Jaquel Spivey is counting his blessings. The 25-year-old actor has already led the Tony-winning company of A Strange Loop, was himself nominated for Best Actor in a Musical, and is now the latest performer taking up the mantle of everyone’s favorite almost-too-gay-to-function high schooler, Damian Hubbard, in the reimagined Mean Girls movie musical.
Damian Hubbard has — in his infinite slay — gifted Spivey a rewrite of sorts, a way to tap back into his experience of high school and give himself a better ending. Damian is, according to Spivey, what you get when you take a character who sashays around, and then throw in some musical numbers and sprinkle a little glitter.
Related: Internet Mean Girls Came After Avantika. She Continues to Laugh.
“It’s nice to step into a character who’s Black, plus-size, queer, and he takes no sh*t from anybody,” Spivey tells Teen Vogue. “Damian is truly just that b*tch and he’s minding his business. If it’s drama, it’s drama around him, it doesn’t involve him. There’s nobody coming for his size. There’s nobody coming for his queerness. He’s not getting slammed in lockers and slushied like an episode of Glee. He has power in this space.”
Spivey adds, “Damian knows he’s a star. He knows he’s that kid at school, so he doesn’t seek permission from anybody to be himself.” Spivey knows that past depictions of fat queer people were “not loud, and not too proud about much.” Damian, bold and unabashed, challenges that: “He’s just like, this is Damian Hubbard … these are the intersections of my life.”
Of course, stories about the difficulty of existing at those intersections do have their necessary place. “That’s cute,” Spivey says, “but it’s not always a sob story. Maybe I’m a bad b*tch because I’m queer. Maybe I’m a bad b*tch because I’m plus-size, I got some hips, I got some curves. Maybe those are the things that make me a star — to me.”
While Spivey was bold at school (“It was nothing for me to sashay down the hallway and not give a damn”), his junior and senior years left a lot to be desired — the result of uprooting everything he knew in just two weeks and moving to live with his aunt in Montclair, New Jersey. Stepping on to the Mean Girls set at a real disused high school, seeing his new friends everyday, and creating something beautiful was the perfect coda to those blemished teenage years.
Launching from stage to screen, Spivey appears to see with fresh, unjaded eyes. He’s still enamored with the craft of film, still notices the camera operators, personal assistants, gaffers, make-up artists: “All of these people who won’t even make it in the shot are still coming into this space with such joy and such great energy to make this work beautiful and to make what we do, beautiful.” He’s taken — and applied — his fair share of lessons from A Strange Loop.
“Jaquel means so much more than the show,” he says. “Jaquel comes before the show, and Jaquel comes before the need for people to make money.” It’s about knowing your limits, setting boundaries, checking yourself enough to know when body and mind have taken a back seat. “Especially when you do Broadway, they will use you for everything you have, and go about their business.” Keeping that same energy for Mean Girls, Spivey has learned to find the fun and feel the joy while working. “It really just taught me, fun has to be in the work just as much as the work exists.”
Spivey is admittedly “weird” on camera, but the person on camera that we’ll see is Damian, and that’s an important distinction. “I leave Jaquel in the dressing room,” he says. That’s especially easy when three paces outside of that dressing room is the school hallway, where Damian just comes alive.
“It works well for me because my anxiety and my nervousness just means that I care a lot,” Spivey says. “Use that nervousness and that anxiety to show why you care so much, like it can either hold you back, or it can propel you forward. For me, being in live theatre, you have one chance to win this audience over. And if you let anxiety win, that's one show that you've completely lost, that's over 100 people that do not get their money's worth, they don't get the story. So I mean, if there is some awkwardness, you better hide that sh*t well, and do your job.”
Finding Damian’s voice was one of the hardest yet fulfilling parts of the role for Spivey, who used a character voice for Usher in A Strange Loop. Spivey trained for several years, built technique, and grew his unique voice, only to scrap it in favor of shaping it towards how Usher is meant to sound. But in recording Damian, Spivey was able to feel him out and bring his own sound to the booth, which left him sobbing. The first few takes were closer to Spivey today than his teen years. “I sounded like somebody’s father,” Spivey recalls. “I came in with this vocal that was just like in the depths of my soul, and I was like ooh let’s lift his tone up a little bit more. He’s a kid Jaquel, he ain’t 25.”
We’ll forever mourn the omission of Damian’s “Where Do You Belong?” and “Stop” musical numbers (IYKYK), but Spivey’s here to assist the “awesome women in telling this story. It is Mean Girls,” he emphasizes. “As much as Damian is an icon, there’s a focus in this movie…It’s not the Damian show, it is about these girls and their time in high school.” But, fear not, “I still give a little bit of a vocal.”
This moment hasn’t arrived for Spivey without help, though. The actor opened up in a recent livestream about a GoFundMe campaign he made to help him finish college in Pittsburgh. He reflected on its magnitude, how he was financially uplifted by friends and family to graduate, how five years later, his face is on a Mean Girls billboard in Times Square. “I’m trying to do well on the investment every day,” Spivey says. “That investment got me here, I would be a fool to take all the credit.”
Spivey’s chief reason for sharing this was to encourage others to pursue their dreams in this space. “All these Hollywood and Broadway stories are always so damn pretty,” he says. “It’s hard to hear about how easy it is to make it in the industry when it’s coming from somebody who [it’s like], you’ve had training since you were five years old, you went to the top school for training, and you ended up in the right rooms.”
“Sometimes life is not that sweet,” he continues. “Sometimes your mom doesn’t have money for voice lessons. Sometimes you don’t have an acting class near you. Sometimes you don’t have the accessibility to see yourself in these spaces.” Spivey graduated with help from the campaign donors, received the lead role in A Strange Loop a few months later, and booked Mean Girls during that Broadway run.
More than anything, Spivey’s role in Mean Girls marks a special time for his family and far-away supporters. Those who have never been able to see him perform, “because they couldn’t afford a commute to Broadway and a ticket,” can go to their local theatre and watch him on screen. “I’m in something that my family can see miles away, and it not take all their rent money. That alone is the win for me.”
What’s next for Spivey? Well, he’s still counting his blessings. “I was on Broadway with people who were saying, I’ve been in New York for 20 years. Like, they moved to New York the year I was born and made their Broadway debuts with me. There are people in my life who are still trying to get a movie, to get a TV show, things like that. So I dare not step into any of these spaces without a heart of gratitude.”
His heart is set on inspiring the kind of queer, Black kid that he used to be; the child watching the Tonys, wondering if they could do that too. “If I'm not paying it forward, then I don't need to be doing it,” he says. “If I'm just doing it for me and to make me a star, then I’d rather just go back to Raleigh and build a home, start a family and mind my business.” Money is nice, he adds. We love money, but money isn’t the goal, and money isn’t his purpose.
But how can we expect young talent to know which path to follow, or even rally the courage to forge their own, when the people they see dominating these spaces aren’t Black, aren’t queer, aren’t fat, aren’t femme? “The world isn't always so kind and welcoming to people in my body and people that have my skill set,” Spivey says. “You don't know you can make it when you see the same people every time that you can't relate to.”
“If I can do that for somebody,” Spivey says, if he can be a north point for even one kid, then that’s his purpose fulfilled. That innate need to inspire, nurture, the call to pass it on to the next generation, strikes a chord. I suggest that this is Spivey’s ancestors speaking through him. It hits him quietly. Something shifts in his spirit.
Spivey is a star. “Do stars look like me, and do stars sound like me?” he asks. Growing up, possibility only stretches as far as we can perceive on screen and in pop culture. “They don’t look like me up there. They don’t move the way I move. They don’t sound the way I sound. And that’s not my problem.”
Related: Which Mean Girls Character Are You According to Your Zodiac Sign?
It therefore makes sense that Spivey’s word for this year is fearless. “We put so many limitations on ourselves. I’ve put so many limitations on what Jaquel can be,” Spivey says. “I don't like to always bring up the intersectionalities of my existence. But I think I would be a fool to not say that I am a fat man, who has led a Broadway show. And I'm a fat man who is in Mean Girls, and I am a Black man, I'm a queer man. I'm not presenting masc, I'm giving any femme energy that I want to give. And if I want to give some masc energy, I can do that. I can do whatever the hell I want to do.”
Spivey casts his mind back to young Jaquel. The words with which he would affirm that boy. “He’s trying to figure out why he is so different, why he’s being treated so differently,” he says. “I will just speak affirmations into how worthy he is, and how necessary he is.” Not that he didn’t get that from his family, but it hits different when you find someone that feels like a representation of yourself, someone to mold yourself towards. “I would really just love on him and affirm him more than anything, because life every day tries to show you why you’re not enough.”
Young Jaquel was waiting for one person, like Tituss Burgess or James Monroe Iglehart, to show him it was possible. “Where’s that man that can just walk on the stage or on the screen, just as big as he is?” he says. “He has his queerness, he has all this stuff. But he’s not a joke. He’s not walking around with his head down. He’s not getting beat up. He’s not getting disrespected. He’s just being himself. And Damian brought that to me.”
