A teenage Ben Platt (center, red jacket) performs in ‘Guys and Dolls’ at Camp Ramah in California. (Courtesy Camp Ramah)
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Ben Platt childhood photo
College/University
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Columbia University New York, United States
Career
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2012
Ben Platt in Pitch Perfect (2012)
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2013
Nokia Theatre, Los Angeles, California, United States
Utkarsh Ambudkar, Hana Mae Lee, Alexis Knapp, Ester Dean, and Ben Platt at an event for 2013 MTV Movie Awards (2013)
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2014
United States
Meryl Streep, John DeLuca, Marc Platt, Ben Platt, and Daniel Huttlestone at an event for Into the Woods (2014)
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2014
Anna Kendrick and Ben Platt at an event for Into the Woods (2014)
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2014
Meryl Streep, Marc Platt, and Ben Platt at an event for Into the Woods (2014)
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2015
Hailee Steinfeld and Ben Platt in Pitch Perfect 2 (2015)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2016
125 E 11th St, New York, NY 10003, USA
Actor Ben Platt attends the 61st Annual Obie Awards at Webster Hall on May 23, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Pont/Getty Images for American Theater Wing)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2017
Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan, New York City
Ben Platt at an event for The 71st Annual Tony Awards (2017)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2017
Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan, New York City
Ben Platt at an event for The 71st Annual Tony Awards (2017)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2017
Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan, New York City
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt at an event for The 71st Annual Tony Awards (2017)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2017
Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan, New York City
Tina Fey and Ben Platt at an event for The 71st Annual Tony Awards (2017)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2018
Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York, U.S.
Ben Platt at an event for The 60th Annual Grammy Awards (2018)
Gallery of Ben Platt
2018
4 Pennsylvania Plaza, New York, NY 10001, USA
Actor Ben Platt performs onstage during the 60th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Madison Square Garden on January 28, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for NARAS)
Actor Ben Platt attends the 61st Annual Obie Awards at Webster Hall on May 23, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Pont/Getty Images for American Theater Wing)
Actor Ben Platt performs onstage during the 60th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Madison Square Garden on January 28, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for NARAS)
Ben Platt is an American actor and singer. He was starred in the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen. Also, he has been the part of the movies like Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.
Background
Platt was born on September 24, 1993, in Los Angeles, the fourth of five children of Julie (née Beren) and Marc Platt. His father is a film, television and theater producer whose credits include the musical Wicked. His family is Jewish. His older brother Jonah is an actor, writer, and composer.
Education
Ben attended the Adderley School for Performing Arts in Pacific Palisades, performing in productions like Bye Bye Birdie and Into the Woods. Platt attended Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, graduating in 2011.
Ben attended Columbia University in New York, but dropped out after six weeks to fulfill his contract with The Book of Mormon. Subsequently, he attended the school and became a member of the campus a cappella musical group Nonsequitur.
Ben Platt has said that he caught the acting bug at the age of nine, when he was cast as Winthrop in a production of The Music Man at the Hollywood Bowl, alongside Kristin Chenoweth and Eric McCormack. He later returned to the Hollywood Bowl in Camelot and The Sound of Music, and at the age of 11, he was cast in the national tour of Caroline, or Change. Platt performed in several other musicals as a student, including during his time at the performing arts school Adderley.
Platt accepted the role of Benji in the 2012 film comedy-musical Pitch Perfect. Focusing on the world of university a cappella competitions, the movie's hit cast album arrived via Universal in September of 2012. Later the same year, Platt began a run as Elder Cunningham in the Chicago production of The Book of Mormon. He went on to make his Broadway debut in January 2014 in the same role, leaving it in January 2015. Pitch Perfect 2 followed later in 2015, as did a role in the Meryl Streep comedy-drama Ricki and the Flash. He spent July and August of 2015 playing the title role in a Washington, D.C. production of Dear Evan Hansen, a stage musical he'd joined in the workshopping stages.
In December 2016, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's Dear Evan Hanson opened on Broadway. About a high school senior whose social anxiety made it difficult for him to connect to others, the show became a box office hit and garnered nine Tony Award nominations. In Septembere, he signed with Atlantic Records as a singer/songwriter.
In March 2018, Platt collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the benefit single "Found/Tonight," a mash-up of songs from Hamilton and Dear Evan Hanson. It was released by Atlantic in conjunction with March for Our Lives, a protest march to promote gun reform following the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida a month earlier. It reached the top half of the Billboard Hot 100.
Ben is very open about his Jewish background. His mom, Julie, credits their religious upbringing to keeping their kids so grounded in Hollywood.
As a child, Platt attended Camp Ramah in California, one in a network of Jewish summer camps affiliated with the Conservative Judaism Movement. During an interview on "Late Night with Seth Meyers," Platt told Meyers that he was once in a Camp Ramah production of the musical "Guys and Dolls" in which he performed the lead role of Sky Masterson entirely in Hebrew. Camp Ramah was more crucial in helping him to develop his Jewish identity and figure out what aspects of Judaism meant the most to him.
“Obviously my family’s traditions are beautiful and I loved growing up in my family, but until I went to camp, everything was just what I was taught by the family, which is wonderful, but there comes a time when you need to figure out for yourself what is going to mean the most to you, and what will keep you connected to your Judaism,” said Platt.
“So going to camp and being your own person there, and learning how to socialize with all these other Jewish kids and discuss Judaism openly was a huge impactful thing for me, and that is kind of the reason that I am still very close to my Judaism,” he said.
The actor’s love for Camp Ramah is shared by all members of his family. He and all his four siblings went to Camp Ramah in California, and to Ramah Israel Seminar, a six-week trip to Israel for rising high school seniors. Photos on Platt’s Facebook page indicate that he opted to also go to Poland for 10 days with Ramah prior to arriving in Israel for Seminar in the summer of 2009.
Platt’s mother, Los Angeles Jewish community lay leader and philanthropist Julie Platt, is a past board chair of Camp Ramah in California. In a November 2015 interview with the Jewish Journal, Julie Platt, who grew up in a tiny Jewish community in Wichita, Kansas, said that her own most formative Jewish experience was attending Camp Ramah.
Politics
Ben hates Trump, and he's not afraid to show it. Ben is never shy to state his political views on any social media platform. He once said : "I’m an actor with limited political knowledge. There are things I don’t understand. But I‘ve been trying to imagine being a representative or senator watching kids getting shot in school every day only in the US, then choosing to focus my immediate daily efforts on anything else."
Views
Quotations:
"There's something to be said for any boy growing up among lots of other boys who like to play basketball and football, while all I wanted to do was put on musicals. Mentally, I was always in my own world."
"I have had a struggle with anxiety, always, and as a proud Jew, that's not a surprising thing."
"There was never anything else I wanted to pursue. It was always theater, and movies are a fairly new thing."
"From day one, musical theater was my bread and butter."
"I was packing to go to Columbia University, and they told me that weekend that I got the 'Pitch Perfect.'"
"'Pitch Perfect 2' is about the Bellas and what happens to them as they get older. All your favorite characters are coming back. Chrissie Fit was great, and Hailee Steinfeld is such a pro - she fit right in. I had no idea she was 17! She's the most mature girl ever."
"We've done as best a job as we can making it clear that I'm earning what I'm earning because of me and not because of who my father is. But at the same time, I'm not ignoring things that would be dumb to ignore, like people that I can know through him and experiences I can have through him and things that I can learn from him."
"If you had asked me, in the days of me dreaming about what would happen in the future, who I would want to write my first original musical, it would hands-down have been Pasek and Paul."
"I had a 'Cats' phase, where I did lots of overturned furniture and trash cans. I asked for a fog machine for my birthday."
Personality
Often in the entertainment business, we find that fame corrupts. However, despite his celebrity status, Ben has exemplified the definition of the "adorably witty boy-next-door" persona. If sunshine could be personified, it would be Ben Platt.
Ben has a dog named Bella, after the "Barden Bellas" in Pitch Perfect. He is said to be very close to Beanie Feldstein, his friend since high school. Ben and his friend Beanie who appeared in the movie ‘The Ladybird’, have featured together in some Broadway shows. The two have made several appearances together stirring relationship rumors. But they seem to be just friends. However, none of them has confirmed nor debunked the rumors.
Physical Characteristics:
Eye colour - Blue
Hair colour - Light Brown
Build - Average
Height - 5 ft 9¼ in or 176 cm
Weight - 69 kg or 152 lbs
Measurements - Chest – 39 in or 99 cm
Arms / Biceps – 13 in or 33 cm
Waist – 32 in or 81 cm
Interests
He is big Harry Potter fan. He's a Hufflepuff.
He loves to dance.
His favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Writers
Joanne Rowling
Favorite Books – The Harry Potter series.
Sport & Clubs
Ben loves SoulCycle and relies on it to remain fit and keep fat off his body.
Music & Bands
He is a huge Beyonce fan.
Connections
Looking at his personal life, he is unmarried. His private life and dating history info aren’t available.