Dylan Mulvaney Is Finally a Broadway Leading Lady, Haters Be Damned

“Once I stepped into my womanhood, I felt like the main character of my life,” Dylan Mulvaney tells me, while sipping her lemon drop. “So now that means that I can be the main character on stage.” The social media star and I are dining at Arno, a traditional Italian restaurant, on a frigid evening in January in lower Midtown, a stone’s throw from Penn Station. There’s a good reason we’re dining in a less-than-ideal location—Arno is blocks away from Ripley-Grier Studios, where Mulvaney has just spent the day rehearsing for her Broadway debut as the second, and most infamous, of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn, in the Tony-winning musical Six.

Mulvaney’s penchant for girlish giggles and squeals between bites of her spaghetti pomodoro stand out in Arno, especially when juxtaposed against the sea of older gentlemen in an assortment of ill-fitting grey blazers sitting behind her at the bar. She’s wearing a black ballet dress with her long brown hair half up, half down, instantly reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn—something that was by design. “I noticed if I look good for rehearsal, if I fuck up, I’m like, Oh, well, at least I look good,” she says. After years of living in Los Angeles, she’s adjusting to life in NYC. “I feel like if I walk outside for five seconds, I run into somebody that I’ve slept with or somebody that I want to sleep with. You kind of have to look good all the time.”

Mulvaney’s about a week into a four-week rehearsal process to fulfill a lifelong dream of hers—starring in a Broadway musical. It’s not an understatement to say that the world has watched her reach this moment. Her legion of social media followers—1.5 million on Instagram and 9 million on TikTok, as of publishing—have been hooked on Mulvaney’s confessional online content since she began her series “365 Days of Girlhood” on March 13, 2022, which served as a daily chronicle of her gender-affirming transition from male to female. Mulvaney left nothing off the table—the highs, the lows, and the messy in-betweens of becoming the woman she always knew that she was.

Even pre–social media fame and pre-transition, the San Diego native had grease paint roaring through her veins, but didn’t necessarily know where to put that energy as she struggled with her gender identity. Her theatrical dreams “were so small because I hadn’t found my true self. In order to confine myself to a gender that I knew that I wasn’t,” Mulvaney shares. “I had to be like, Oh, I want to be in the ensemble. I want to be in the back. I want to be tree number three.” Looking back, she could count on one hand the roles that she felt even partially represented in as a child struggling with their gender identity—Kurt from Glee, Ernst from Spring Awakening. “There were so few roles that I could even find femininity in,” she says

Despite her misgivings, she persisted, studying musical theater at the University of Cincinnati College of Music, which boasts prestigious musical theater program, and even playing Elder White in the national tour of Book of Mormon. There, again, her ambition and dreams were stifled by her present-day reality, trapped in a body that was anathema to her. “When I was doing Book of Mormon, I was like, ‘Well, hopefully I’ll just do this for the rest of my life, and I get a lot of Botox,’” she says, wryly.

Mulvaney’s career fell into place when she began her transition journey. Last year, she starred in her own one-woman musical show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World, at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which included an opening number written by the Tony-winning songwriters behind Six, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. But even prior to her meteoric rise on social media, she recalls her world expanding when she began “lightly transitioning” in 2022. Ironically, during this time, she first auditioned for the national tour of Six. “I was they/them pronouns. No hormones yet. And I auditioned for the show, and I got a callback for Anne Boleyn,” she says. The thought of getting the part was almost too much for Mulvaney to bear. “If I get to do this, I will never ask for anything ever again. This is what will make me happy.”

She didn’t get the part. But that experience makes Mulvaney stepping into the role now all the more sweet. “It’s crazy when you dream of something and then it doesn’t happen for years, you’re like, Oh shit. Well, somebody listened,” she says. “It’s all about timing.” Well, that and maybe one other thing. “And I have a completely different face than when I auditioned.”

In April 2023—around day 385 of girlhood—Mulvaney became the unwitting face of trans panic. Conservatives across the country began boycotting Bud Light after Mulvaney collaborated with the brand on a paid social media post that involved Bud Light sending Mulvaney a personalized can of Bud Light with her face on it. The incident, which Mulvaney cheekily refers to as “Beergate,” had far-ranging corporate consequences. Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, saw second-quarter sales drop over 10%, and, for the first time, Modelo Especial surpassed Bud Light as the top-selling beer in the United States.

Mulvaney weathered that storm—and gained more notoriety and followers in the process. But when it was announced that she was stepping into the role of Anne Boleyn in December of 2025, she experienced deja vu, with conservatives criticizing her casting, calling it “woke” and lamenting on social media that they “made Anne Boleyn trans.” There were so many negative comments that the Six social media team made its X account private. “The protection, safety, and support of the Six cast has always been, and remains, our highest priority,” said Six producers in a joint statement. “While we welcome passionate engagement with the show, aggressive, threatening, or abusive behaviour is never acceptable.”

“All of a sudden, the far right started attacking me and the show,” Mulvaney says, sipping her cocktail. “And I’m like, since when have you ever cared about Broadway? They don’t care. They would have never gone to see this, and if they had, they would hate it even if I wasn’t in it.”

While it’s arguably more ridiculous than Beergate, this go round, Mulvaney doesn’t feel as lonely as the first time the pitchforks were coming her way. “When I think about Beergate, I felt pretty isolated as far as not having a lot of support,” Mulvaney says. (For what it’s worth, she hasn’t worked with the beverage brand since the kerfuffle.) But with Six, she feels more supported. “The producers are on my side. My cast is checking in on me. I think that’s where I’m like, Oh my God, I’m not actually alone.”

She also can’t help but notice some “weird parallels” between herself and Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded for treason after being caught having an affair. In the show, Mulvaney sings the showstopping number “Don’t Lose Ur Head” (get it?), which chronicles the series of unfortunate events of Boleyn’s untimely demise with the repeated refrain: “Sorry, not sorry about what I said. I’m just trying to have some fun. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t lose your head. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

Like Boleyn before her, Mulvaney is a girl who incurs the wrath of the masses by simply living her life. “There’s all these extremists in the world who see me as this horrible, problematic woman. I think me and Anne just wanted to have a voice,” says Mulvaney. “We were so passionate about feeling seen and heard—that we have the right to have an opinion and to celebrate ourselves. Even when you hear about Anne Boleyn today, it’s often in a very negative light—that she was this promiscuous woman. If you actually look back at the historical accuracy, she was very unproblematic and did all these great things for the world, but people don’t hold onto that.”

Mulvaney is aware that the bigots and haters are out there—she sees them on her phone every day. But when it comes to her day-to-day life, she feels protected by “the bubbles that I exist in” as a professional theater performer in New York. Still, she wonders: “Where are they? I got to tell you, it was pretty rough the past two years,” she admits. “It does freak me out when I go into Trader Joe’s, and I’m like, Oh, does my cashier hate me or think that I’m not a woman?”

But it’s not something she frets over for too long—she’s got too much work to do, and has done too much work on herself to get distracted by the noise. “I know now that people’s opinion, especially from the internet, is so off as far as who we actually are,” she says. “I’m the type of person, believe it or not, that doesn’t want to make a lot of waves. I’m not trying to be controversial.” She takes a beat. “That’s what’s so sad—when your identity is inherently controversial and having to accept that there are people that aren’t going to understand. So if I can help even just one person understand my experience, then that’s a win for me and the show.”

Away from all the drama, Mulvaney is the quintessential girl’s girl, and a single one at that. And like any single gal in the city, she’s got romance on the mind. “I’m excited to date in New York. I’m just a tricky order. I’m trans. I’m in the public eye. I don’t know where I live most of the time,” Mulvaney says. “I’ve gone on dates before where people will say that I’m quite intimidating. I’ve never intentionally put out there, but I think being so firm in my identity and who I am can be tricky for people who maybe are still figuring out what their journey is. It takes a very confident person to match my energy.”

And she knows what type of confident person she’s looking for at the moment. “I want to hopefully hook up with someone really hot, who’s maybe also in a Broadway show,” she says. “And then we meet each other after our shows, and then we sleep until noon the next day.” When I point out that Broadway’s grueling schedule might make it difficult to date, she’s unperturbed. “Well, I mean, the show’s over at 8:30,” she quips.

That’s not to say she’s taking her new gig lightly. “It’s a fucking tough show,” she says. “The hardest part is probably stamina.” She asks if I’ve ever seen the early aughts musical theater reality show The Search for Elle Woods, in which contestants would run on treadmills while belting high E’s. (The answer? Of course I have.) “I was like, that’s what I need to be doing for the show,” says Mulvaney.

While the pressure is on, Mulvaney is also learning to be kind to herself as she takes on a part that was initially written for a cis-woman. “It definitely has taken a little bit of a learning curve,” Mulvaney says. “Most of the show we’re keeping in the original key. So I think that’s the part where I have to be kind of soft with myself. I’m like, Dylan, if you can’t do something, because you have a biological disadvantage in some ways. That’s okay.” Still, she intends to take pristine care of herself during the run: “If you see me out at a fucking club, you send me home.”