Something magical happens when people hear John Cameron Mitchell’s name. Without pause, it conjures stories of his works, most often his films: “Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus were revolutionary for me as a young gay in college, figuring out queerness and sex and art!” one person says. “I would say [watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch] helped change the trajectory of my life. It was hands-down an experience that would eventually lead me to pursuing a career in art. I later used the GI Bill to go to School of Visual Arts and had a 15 year career working in fashion photography as a result,” said another. And then there are the tattoos: the face split in two– depicting, as Hedwig sings in the film, “The Origin of Love”—one half on elbows, feet, wrists matches another somewhere else that’s seeking, or has found, its mate. Sometimes it’s just Hedwig herself. Blonde and bewigged with a smear of her signature blue eyeshadow, she wails into a microphone, a permanent celebration of her story as a misfit who makes art to transcend the challenging circumstances of her life and ultimately wins.

The memories are an incantation Mitchell knows well, especially as his now-classic film Hedwig and the Angry Inch celebrates its 25th anniversary on the heels of the theatrical version, which debuted three years prior. Throughout the summer and into the fall, Mitchell will be touring with the film across the country, doing stoned director’s cut commentary (“I don’t want to do that sober. I’ve seen it 10,000 times. That keeps it interesting,” he laughs), performing some songs acoustically (occasionally with friends), and taking audience Q&A, doing meet-and-greets–it will vary from city to city depending on the setups and technology available.

And what a gift to those formed by Hedwig as young people that the film they love so dearly wasn’t a story of dancing princesses or big green ogres. Instead, the star was a gender nonconforming émigré from the wrong side of the tracks who sought freedom in rock and roll. It was a story to take with you through any phase of life, to remember, as Mitchell says, what it means to be punk: to make art for yourself outside of a system, to promote creativity and collaboration, “to make something useful for people, useful for their lives that isn’t just about selling.” He remembers making Hedwig in a time when people were trying to survive the AIDS crisis, not just scrolling through social media. “AIDS activism was a kind of applied punk, so a lot of what I do lately is encourage people to think about their own punk,” he says.

Incidentally, this is in part how Hedwig itself began. Mitchell had started in New York as a traditional Broadway actor–Big River, Six Degrees of Separation, and The Secret Garden were some of his earliest roles. But it was in seeing the off-Broadway work of Charles Busch and Charles Ludlam, the films of Todd Haynes, Wong Kar-Wai, and Gus Van Sant, that Mitchell saw what was possible beyond tradition. Hedwig was a similar exercise in what could happen outside of the mainstream. Its success was unexpected. “It was something we made for our friends,” Mitchell says. “It was something that could never be on Broadway at the time. It could never be up for an Oscar. It was too strange–the punk, the drag, the queerness seemed very specific in what the kids call ‘niche’ today.” And he hates the word “niche.” “I’m like, what does niche have to do with you? What do you like? As opposed to, what are you supposed to like,” he says.

Mitchell has built a career answering to his own desires and interests, following his own curiosity. In the process, he established himself as a singular voice, whether as a director, a writer, a singer, an actor, or even an interior designer. He’s currently at work on a play called LSM about the artists and lovers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore–LSM are the initials they used to sign letters to each other. His memoir-in-progress, A Heart Held Outside the Body, will arrive on bookshelves within the next two years. Hedwig recently began a stage production in China. He just finished a run as Mary Todd Lincoln in Cole Escola’s ongoing hit Oh, Mary!

Mitchell worships at the altar of creativity, of passion, of theatre. It was something he learned to do after transmuting the Catholic devotion with which he was raised, he says, choosing instead to make theatre his church. He took with him what he actually enjoyed from the experience–joy, community, mutual aid, collaboration, and “story making without the rigidity of the guilt, and ‘you have to do this, you have to do that,’” he says. “In some ways, I like it when theater and art become collaborative and community- based and do help people.”

In that way, Mitchell sees himself as more of a populist than an elitist, he says. “I can be a snob about quality–like ‘that could be funnier,’ and ‘that could be better to me,’…but to me, anyone can use their imagination, anyone can be an artist, and it’s in that zone, that flow of imagination, even if it’s crafting your sweater or whatever it is, that we find a meditative peace.” He remains excited for new challenges–what if he performed one of his plays in France in French, he wonders. What if he wrote fiction, what if, what if…and the list goes on. And all along, he’s remained an original. “I definitely feel more myself than I ever have. I think continuous artistic explorations settle you into yourself.”

This story appears in the pages of V161: now available for purchase!