‘Dear Evan Hansen’s Ben Platt Says Film Revealed “Horrific” Side of the Internet to Him: “Definitely a Disappointing Experience”

Ben Platt says he was hurt by the internet’s collective laughter over his performance in the movie version of Dear Evan Hansen released last year. Platt first starred as high schooler Evan Hansen in the stage production from 2014 through 2016, and reprised his role as a 27-year-old, much to the amusement of Twitter.

Now, Platt says the mockery got under his skin and showed how ugly the internet can be. The actor told The New York Times the Broadway experience of Dear Evan Hansen was “a dream come true,” but the film version was anything but.

“It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be,” he said. “You’d think, after doing Dear Evan Hansen onstage for four years, I would have already known that.”

While Platt won a Tony for his work on 2016’s Dear Evan Hansen, his more recent take on the character was much less celebrated. The movie version of the musical currently holds at 29% on Rotten Tomatoes and was panned by Decider’s John Serba as “a grim trudging cringe that lives up to its reputation as a singular tonal failure.”

Platt was also mocked online from the very start, with commenters complaining about his age in the film after the trailer was released. Platt, who was 27 at the time, was playing at 17-year-old in the film.

Vulture joked that Platt looked even older than his age as a result of the movie’s efforts to send him back to high school. Nate Jones wrote in 2021, “It’s that all the film’s efforts to transform him into a plausible teenager have the reverse effect of making the character of Evan Hansen appear to be somewhere in his mid-40s. When he gets up onstage for the second act’s big musical number, I wasn’t sure if he was going to memorialize his dead classmate or speak on the importance of 401(k) matching.”

Platt, who told The Times he’s no longer on Twitter because the site “is almost exclusively for tearing people down,” seems to be moving ahead despite the Dear Evan Hansen backlash, and thinking of only the good that came from the film.

“I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it,” he said. “It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.”