Billy Porter Is Living Loud On ‘Live With Kelly & Ryan’

Tony Award winner Billy Porter on ‘Live with Kelly & Ryan’

Billy Porter, Tony Award winner (Kinky Boots) and star of the new FX series Pose, recently dropped by Live with Kelly & Ryan to dish on the new series and how he ‘found’ show business.

It all has to do with The Wiz, Dreamgirls and thirsting for Jordache jeans.

Billy shares that theater first came into his life when his grandmother took him to see a national touring company of the Broadway musical, The Wiz, on his birthday in Pittsburgh, PA.

“I just fell in love,” says Porter. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I can actually do this for a living?’”

That revelation led to a job performing at a theme park the summer he turned 15 years-old. It was a grueling schedule of six shows a day, but Porter had his eyes on a prize.

“I stayed in a motel, I was fifteen, my mom had to give me permission to work cause I needed my Jordache jeans,” says the future Broadway star. “Oh, she said ‘You got champagne taste on a beer budget – you gonna have to find a job!’”

It wasn’t all glamour though.

“I had to wash out my costumes in the bathtub and hang them to drip dry for the next day,” shared Porter. “But what it did was it taught me discipline; it taught me how to show up for work every day because we work six days a week.”

“I was 15 years old working six days a week but I made that money honey – I got them jeans Jordache jeans.”