Jeremy O’Harris is the life of the party – even when he’s on death’s door. We’re an hour away from the press opening of his Slave Play in London, and his friends have convened in his room at Chiltern Firehouse. Champagne is flowing, but O’Harris is strictly on the juice shots: he’s getting over a cold he picked up partying with Charli XCX at GQ Heroes last week.
“It looks like summer, but it is winter here. So I have like a winter chill to both my voice and my brain,” he says, commenting on the spectacular failure of the British summer. O’Harris is louder than life (“Can someone get some music going in here?”) when poorly, and all 6’5 of him is regally draped in custom Wales Bonner .
“Grace [Wales Bonner] and I met a couple years ago when I was still at school, and we just connected because she's such a polymath and does all types of art. I'm drawn to people like that because I aspire to do the same.” The multi-hyphenate showman is perhaps best known in the UK for his role as diva designer Grégory Elliott Duprée on Emily in Paris .
That’s about to change. This week marks the London opening of Slave Play , the highly acclaimed and controversial work about race, identity and sexuality that O’Harris first wrote back in 2019. This isn’t your mum’s big Agatha Christie night out.
Slave Play centres around three interracial couples undergoing a therapy that involves roleplaying life on an antebellum cotton plantation. It’s heavy. It wants .
