Ezra Miller Covers Holiday Issue of GQ Style Winter 2018
Photographed by Yoshiyuki Matsumura, the 26-year-old actor from Fantastic Beasts, admits to Allie Jones that he’s living in Vermont.
“People think I’m someone who exaggerates,” he says. “I think people tend to associate me as somewhat hyperbolic in my tendencies. I’m actually not so.” He grins. “I try to be very honest.”
Ezra Miller is the gender-bending, goat-delivering Hollywood star of the future.
Miller actually has four goats, he explains on our walk over to the periwinkle blue barn.
He’s holding a blue tin of American Spirit tobacco (which he never opens) and a mug of thick, brownish liquid that is “full of greens and adaptogens and plant-based proteins that fill one with energy and vivaciousness,” he says. “We would call it The Juice of the Biggest Boy.”
Miller himself is quite slender, with the high cheekbones and perfect jawline of a Victorian prince. For this long day of goat birth, he has chosen to wear a Bikini Kill T-shirt, black pants, light green winter boots from L.L. Bean, and a floor-length, paint-splattered Alexander McQueen coat. (“If I think about what [McQueen] would want me to do while wearing this coat—fucking be a midwife at a goat birth? Fuck yeah!” he says later. “Would he have been mad if some amniotic fluid got on this? No! He would have been delighted.”)
The goats are listening to NPR when Miller carefully opens the barn door. They love it, he says. Their names are Kathy, Betty, Patty, and Noisette, and they are wearing weather-appropriate pink and purple knit sweaters. “They’re all pregnant,” Miller says, matter-of-factly. “Every goat you’re near right now.” The air is thick with the promise of new life, and the hay floor is dotted with goat shit.
So, okay, Ezra Miller is not a hippie. But who is he? Miller has been acting professionally since he was a teenager. He dropped out of high school when he was 16 and starred in his first big film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, when he was 17. Since then, he’s starred in several critically acclaimed indie films and two big franchises: He’s played The Flash in three DC Comics films in the past three years, and he has also starred in J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts series.
Miller was born and raised in Wyckoff, New Jersey, with two older sisters, Saiya and Caitlin. His dad, Bob Miller, is a book publisher, and his mother, Marta Miller, is a modern dancer and—per Ezra—a “mystic and sage.” He was always going to be a performer.
This became abundantly clear in the first grade, when Miller was assigned a book report. The teacher let him pick any book, so long as it was a certain number of pages, so he picked Cujo, the Stephen King thriller about a rabid St. Bernard. He loved the novel so much that he created a special project about it to share with the class.
“I bought a big stuffed-animal dog, and I covered it in blood,” he says, grinning. “I made a tape recording, and I hooked up the play button of the tape recorder to the dog’s paw… The idea was that you’d push the paw and you’d hear, out of the voice of this bloody stuffed dog, my dramatic reading of Cujo.”
“I think for a lot of artists, [we’re] sensitive. Urban environments are grueling.”
Still, surrounded by so many mood-dampening devices, Miller rose to the occasion. He posed—and I mean posed—for selfies with everyone who asked. He performed for each camera, telling one lucky videographer, “I am Ezra. But you can call me Lil Baby, or Sweet Bitch.” He shimmied and spun around.
There were three other actors from the film at the event, and most of them were wearing suits. Miller luxuriated in a cutoff black Queen T-shirt. He had coaxed his hair into some kind of reverse fashion mullet: short in the back, long in the front, and shaved on one side. His nails were painted black, and he smelled like cigarettes and not deodorant. There was some glitter of unknown origin nestled in the stubble on his perfect jaw.
Afterward, sitting in the hotel’s restaurant, Miller said that he does like to meet fans, because he wants everyone to be on the same level. “It’s almost awkward, the position that I’m in, of being on the other side of some imaginary line,” he said, sipping a carrot juice. “That’s the line to dissolve, right? It’s an illusion that anyone is more involved in a world of fantasy than anyone else for worldly material reasons, like”—he rolled his eyes—”being employed to work on the project.”
“Maybe you can put together a list of celebrity couples who’d want to collectively date me,” he giggled.
The misty lake, Miller explained, is the “fame matrix.” In this metaphor, when you start out in Hollywood, you get in a little boat. “You paddle out and you’re excited!” he said, miming the action.
Back to the Farm
Miller leads me to a small enclosure near his apple orchard. “I wanted to show you my seraphim,” he says. He means his chickens.
We squeeze into the coop and say hello to about a dozen of them: mostly females, though there are two roosters. “Hiii, babies,” Miller says. The chickens are too young now, but when they get a bit older, Miller will let them out of the coop to be “free range.”
“What’s good is the rooster rounds them up at night and brings them back in here,” Miller explains. “That’s how free range works. The rooster will die for any of the chickens.”
“We have a lot of eagles out here, and if an eagle starts dive-bombing the crew, the rooster will go out separate from the herd and pretend to be injured, so that the eagle will come and kill the rooster instead of hurting any of his babies,” Miller says, pointing out the two lucky men who may one day perform this task.
“That’s masculinity,” he says. “That’s what it’s supposed to look like, you know what I mean? I’m going to pretend to be weak, I’m going to pretend to be vulnerable so that you attack me before you’d attack one of the women in my posse. You feel me?”
He pulls out the second half of what appears to be a joint and lights it as we walk into the woods behind the goat barn. Sitting on a hefty rock in the middle of some towering oaks, he starts talking about—well, too much for me to record here. He’s worried about climate change and the patriarchy and how we are going to save humanity. “Let’s rehabilitate men,” Miller says, bringing up the #MeToo movement in Hollywood. “Let’s drop men like flies. I’m with it. And then let’s rehabilitate them when they’re on the ground. This is some Wonder Woman shit right here. What’s the Amazonian solution to this?”
He tells me he’ll sleep in here with her tonight. He already had a vet look at her, but he feels prepared to deal with any complications that may arise. One of his sisters is a midwife—for people—and she “talked me through some of the scariest, weirdest contingencies,” Miller says. “So I’m ready to do a bunch of fucked-up shit.”
You can hit GQStyle.com and your favorite newsstands: @gqstyle.
Photography Yoshiyuki Matsumura @yoshiyuki_matsumura
Actor Ezra Miller @imezramiller
Fashion Director, Stylist: Mobolaji Dawodu @mobolajidawodu
