With her new show FAGHAG, Dylan Mulvaney is re-introducing herself: ‘I’m taking the power back’
With her new one woman musical comedy show FAGHAG, Dylan Mulvaney is re-introducing herself. (Marc Brenner Photography)
Dylan Mulvaney is in a very good mood indeed. “I’m feeling happier than I’ve ever felt,” she beams. Specifically, “at a scale of one to 10, it was an 11 today so far, and hopefully a 12 tomorrow.”
There are two possible reasons why the 27-year-old actress and social media star is feeling so content. Firstly, she’s speaking to PinkNews via Zoom a mere hour after receiving a soul-exfoliating massage at a Lush Spa, her “favourite place in the entire world”.
Most likely though is that she’s currently in Scotland performing her brand new, one woman show FAGHAG at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s her first time in the city, let alone at the festival, and she’s diving in headfirst.
As if that wasn’t pressure enough, FAGHAG is also Mulavney’s first solo show full stop. Before gaining an audience on TikTok, shooting to fame during the pandemic, and coming out as trans – more on all that later – the performer had starred most prominently as Elder White in The Book Of Mormon on Broadway, plus in other Off-Broadway shows. She knows how to be on the stage, but FAGHAG is an all new beast.
An autobiographical musical comedy, FAGHAG charts Mulvaney’s upbringing, relationship with her mother, young romance, and her religious background. Raised as a devout Catholic, Mulvaney says she always had a “really strong” relationship with the religion, “until I had a really unfortunate falling out with it, because I didn’t feel like I did belong,” she explains.
FAGHAG delves into her conflicted feelings of faith, and how she’s “tried to navigate my new relationship with the higher power.”
It also looks at her self-described twink to fag hag transition (the show sees her prescribed “TWINK” as a fictionalised drug, a joke about suppressing her gender identity). Now, as a trans woman and a so-called fag hag, she’s having to redefine her relationship with “every kind of human in this world”.
The set is decked out in Barbie pink, honouring Mulvaney’s hyper-feminine brand, and Legally Blonde and The House Bunny inspirations are on full display. “I just wanted to show what the inside of my mind looks like. When I’m having a really good day, it’s the soundtrack of those movies that’s running through my head,” she says.
Yet, in order to capture her life story in full – Lush, where Mulvaney worked aged 16, even gets a mention – FAGHAG also delves into what the star’s life became after she did find fame, and after she come out as a trans woman.
“I think if you’re doing a one woman show, it needs to be something that only you can tell and your perspective. As I was writing it, I realised that I needed to lean in on some of the most vulnerable, weirdly specific and at times uncomfortable moments of my life.”
The highly publicised Dylan Mulvaney story is this: during the pandemic, with theatre shows cancelled, she turned to TikTok to spread her enduringly positive charm at a time where queer people needed it most. Her audience grew then, but after she came out as a trans woman in March 2022, it skyrocketed.
She then turned her attention to her transition in a viral series named “Days of Girlhood”, in which she documented how her life was changing day-by-day for a year, as she embarked on facial feminisation surgery and electrolysis, tried tucking, and answered fan questions. In a landmark moment in October 2022, she was invited to speak with Joe Biden at the White House about trans equality.
The right-wing pile-on of Mulvaney started as a slow burn after that meeting, but in April 2023, it became an inferno. After a remarkably innocuous partnership with beer brand Bud Light, which amounted to a 48-second Instagram video, a nationwide boycott of the beer began. There were threats to bomb Bud Light production factories, while musician Kid Rock filmed a video of himself shooting cans of the stuff in his garden.
The outrage has never really tempered. In December, eight months after the start of the controversy, Republican mouthpiece Matt Walsh was still posting about the fiasco. Mulvaney remains a lightning rod for anti-trans hatred.
We don’t speak about the Bud Light fall out during our chat. She is understandably keen to leave it in the past, and has already explained in videos how it affected her mental health.
Yet it does get a mention, albeit under a different guise, in FAGHAG, in an on the nose scene where she’s deemed “the new face of trans palatability” and offered dozens of brand deals. It’s a quick-witted way of reflecting on how she’s been both villainised and iconified simultaneously over the past 18 months, during a time where her own narrative has been ripped from her hands and made unrecognisable.
“I feel like I have complete ownership of this,” she says of making her theatre return. “If there’s anyone in that theatre who does not support me or who I am or the trans community, they at least have to sit there for an hour and watch what I want to tell them.”
It’s a good point, though it’s unlikely Mulvaney’s crowd will be filled with anyone other than her adoring fans. With more than 10 million followers across TikTok and Instagram alone, there are plenty of people wanting to fill the 300 seats in the venue she’s performing in.
Many of those who do attend will be doing so purely to see the person they idolise in the flesh. Mulvaney knows this, as she’s had audience members tell her so.
“I think what’s fascinating about this is a lot of my followers aren’t really aware of my theatre background. I have people coming to the show that buy a ticket because they may have followed me since ‘Days of Girlhood’,” she shares.
A fair few stars would be irked knowing that some attendees only want to see them to see them, rather than to see the art they’ve created. For Mulvaney though, that lends itself to a Trojan horse scenario. “I’m so happy that they’re now getting to meet me again in the capacity that I really want them to, which is as an actress and as a singer,” she says, still exuding that ineffable optimism.
Plus, it offers her something she’s not really had in recent years, having exploded during lockdown and become known for her online presence: real-life, human interaction.
“It makes all of the trauma and bulls**t worth it because I actually get to connect with real human beings,” she says. “As lovely as making a FaceTime video and seeing the comments and seeing very kind DMs [is], it’s that true human connection that I think I was missing. I think that it’s the greatest gift I’ve ever received is getting to meet everyone in person.”
She might be trying to shake off her label as a TikTok influencer now, but she appreciates how the platform has gotten her to where she is today: “I think this show is really possible because I do now have this amazing group of people that support me on the internet.”
For now, Dylan Mulvaney is loving being in the UK, though the end goal is to take FAGHAG back to the US as an expanded version. “I have a million ideas for it,” she smiles. She does, in fact, have a million ideas in general. Music, books, more theatre: Mulvaney no longer wants to be seen as just the Girlhood girl.
“I have the capacity to know that I can be many different things, but the world – specifically the internet – really wants to make you one thing. And I now feel like I’m taking the power back to say: ‘No, this is what I do, but I also do this and I also do this.’
“It’s tricky,” she summarises. “People often want to put you in a box, but I would like multiple boxes, please.”
FAGHAG is on stage at Edinburgh Fringe Festival until 25 August. Full dates, times and tickets are here.
