“I could not be more thrilled to bring the show back!”

Patrik-Ian Polk is primed and ready for the return of Noah’s Arc, the iconic Logo series he created, wrote, and directed, and which aired for two impactful seasons from October 2005 to October 2006.

The first gay Black TV series, following fabulously femme screenwriter Noah, his best friends Alex, Ricky, and Chance, and his new man Wade, the show fit a world of hot topics — HIV/AIDS, sexual fluidity, infidelity, homophobia — into its too-brief run.

Fans might have been left hanging by the series’ unexpected cancellation, but Polk and crew reunited in 2008 to tie up some loose ends in a film, the wedding comedy Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom.

Now, to mark the show’s 20th anniversary, and following 2020’s reunion special Noah’s Arc: The ‘Rona Chronicles, Noah and company are back again in a new movie, conveniently titled Noah’s Arc: The Movie, written, directed, and executive produced by Polk.

“It is a real love letter to the fans especially,” he says over a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles. “More than one person has told me, ‘Oh my God, we need this in this moment right now.’ And it’s like, that’s why we made this.”

Besides reuniting series regulars Darryl Stephens (Noah), Jensen Atwood (Wade), Rodney Chester (Alex), Christian Vincent (Ricky), Doug Spearman (Chance), and Wilson Cruz (Junito) — and adding guest stars Ts Madison, Jasmine Guy, and Drag Race queen Kennedy Davenport — the film hits Noah and his pals with major life changes, including parenthood, widowhood, and a potentially fatal illness.

Noah was a swinging single twentysomething when the series began. Twenty years later, as the character and his friends get older, telling their stories offers Polk a valuable opportunity to reflect the pleasures and pitfalls of aging as a queer man.

“The interesting thing is, because of the AIDS epidemic, we lost a generation,” says Polk. “So we really didn’t see a certain generation even get to middle age. So it’s almost like a newish kind of thing [both to see and to depict]. I’m at this age, my friends are at this age, and so yeah, it’s about what are these characters going through, and this is what people are going through?

“They’re having children, they’re raising kids, they’re dealing with ailing relatives, they’re dealing with their own health issues,” he continues. “People are dying every other day. Every week there’s someone and we’re going, ‘Shit.’ My cousin was like, ‘Oh, my classmate so-and-so died, just died.’ I had an ex-boyfriend who died recently. He was in his 40s. What the fuck is going on?”

So, the film’s themes are about reflecting all that messy reality, amidst the stable relationships and successful careers. “Again, really one of the reasons I created the show, it was aspirational. It was so that the gay Black kids and people could see a smidgen of what’s possible out there for them. They can have these kinds of lives, they can have these kinds of careers, these kinds of families.”

The film also, of course, showcases the good times these friends have just being friends, with several drag and musical numbers, and a choice soundtrack of disco, hip-hop, and R&B. Classic tracks by Whitney, Diana, and Patti make their appearance.

Music — usually curated by Polk — has always been integral to the world of Noah’s Arc, as it has in all of Polk’s projects, from his breakout gay rom-com Punks and films The Skinny and Blackbird, to the series Being Mary Jane and P-Valley, where he served as writer and co-executive producer.

“I just have always loved music,” he says. “I am a musician, cello at the age of five, saxophone as a teenager, et cetera.” Also a singer-songwriter, who has composed and performed music for his films, Polk was raised to appreciate soul-stirring songs.

“My mother was an avid music fan. She had an amazing record collection that — she’s passed away — but that I have to this day, of a lot of amazing music from the ’70s and ’80s, everything from Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, to the Commodores and Con Funk Shun, and Roberta Flack and Minnie Riperton. So this is why I was introduced to all this amazing music as a kid.”

It’s no mystery then how Sister Sledge became the soundtrack for his first film, Punks.

“Music has always been a big part of my life,” Polk continues. “And in this movie specifically, because again, it’s twenty years later, there’s been nothing like it, I really tried to make it, outside of the story that we’re telling, I wanted it to be just culturally rich. I want there to be a lot of interesting cultural Easter eggs. So there’s a lot of stuff in this movie that hopefully people will dissect, and they’ll pick out all of the things as we go on.”

METRO WEEKLY: First, congratulations on Noah’s Arc‘s 20th anniversary, and celebrating that anniversary with the movie. I think a lot of people might say, “Oh, well, I couldn’t imagine 20 years in, we’re making another movie.” But maybe you did foresee it, maybe you could always imagine it. What does it feel like to be celebrating the 20th anniversary?

PATRIK-IAN POLK: It’s great! I’ve definitely always wanted to do more. We did a COVID special during the pandemic in 2020. It was suggested to me by a former Logo exec that we do a reunion, kind of like the Friends cast did. We just kind of all get on the Zoom, whatever. And that’s how I started working on it, but then it ended up turning into a full episode of the show. So, there was always the intention.

There have been a couple of false starts through the years. At one point, right after we did the Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom film, which, really, I think was kind of a consolation for the cancellation of the series. But I don’t think they were really expecting it to do as well as it did and kind of be as big as it was. And so, immediately they asked me to develop a spinoff. They wanted kind of a Frasier versus Cheers kind of thing. So I developed “Noah and Wade move to New York,” and did that whole thing, wrote two or three scripts for that. Spent a year and change working on that, and then they decided no more scripted for Logo. We’re not making this.

Then, kind of out of the blue, the call came. It was like, “Yeah, okay, you want me to do what? And you want it when? Okay, let’s go.”

MW: So over these past 20 years, while you’re doing Noah stuff, but also working on Being Mary Jane, working on P-Valley, doing Blackbird, doing other things, do these characters — Noah and Wade and company — come to you at random moments or do they just come when called, when it’s time to make a project?

POLK: I don’t really think about them when I’m not thinking about them. But if you ask me, I guess I’ve been ready to pick this up at any time, so I’ve really just been waiting on the powers that be to say, “Here, let’s do this.” The beautiful thing for us is that I feel like we are bombarded with content, and the hot show today that everybody will be talking about twelve months from now, no one will ever mention again. It will be completely out of our consciousness. So to have a show that premiered 20 years ago that is still relevant, that people still want to see…. I’m going to be very curious to see what happens.

I have no doubt that it’s going to perform well. So really, the question will be, what are the powers that be going to do once it does do well? Because Paramount’s in this interesting position — they’ve been in kind of a limbo waiting for this Skydance sale, and all this corporate stuff way above everybody’s pay grade is going on, and when that dust finally settles, hopefully soon, they’re going to need some programming.

[Note: Skydance Media has proposed a merger with Paramount Global, parent company of Paramount Plus, CBS, MTV, Showtime, Logo, BET, and many more.]

So, when our movie premieres this weekend and performs insanely well, like I’m sure it will do, I’m going to be looking at Paramount or Skydance, or whoever. “Look, we’ve been doing this dance for 20 years. It’s time for you to put a ring on it, so let’s go, let’s go.”

MW: In the recap that opens the film, you managed to fit a lot of everything that’s happened over twenty years into a few minutes. How challenging was that?

POLK: The secret to recaps, the trick, the golden rule is very simple. What is in the new episode? What’s in the new thing that you’re about to show? Whatever those stories are with those characters, you need to recap whatever relates to that, because that’s what will count for people seeing it. So you kind of focus on that stuff. You try to get a general sense of what happens, but the real focus is what are the characters going through? Who are they involved with? Ricky, for example, is involved with Junito, so you need to tell that story. Because Ricky had a lot of stories, you know what I mean? So that’s kind of the rule, is you follow that. And if you follow that, it’s pretty obvious what things [to include], but it wasn’t easy to put that together.

MW: This show will always be the first TV series centered around a group of gay Black men. That legacy will exist, period. What does that mean to you?

POLK: It means more to me now. I mean, it didn’t mean a lot to me years ago, because it was just kind of like, yeah, yeah, that’s like, you don’t control legacy, really. You just do the work, and then the world tells you what your legacy is, ultimately. That is what it is. So I have not focused on it. Obviously, I’m older now. I’m in my fifties, and it’s like, okay, well, it does matter. I’m not a billionaire, so what are the rewards for this lifetime of artistic work? So it is very, very cool. It’s certainly cool to hear all the people who have been affected in a positive way by the work, young and old. Young people who continue to discover the work. Some years ago, I did an interview for a magazine, and they called me the father of Black gay cinema. They didn’t tell me in the interview that that’s what it was, but in the article, that’s what it said. And I kind of laughed at it. I thought, “That’s ridiculous.” And every now and then, it’s kind of been repeated, and now I’m at a point where I’m like, “You know what? I will take the title. I will take it, because if not me, then fucking who?”

Because 20 years later, we’ve still not had a Noah’s Arc. We still have nothing similar, nothing close to it. And meanwhile, I’m giving you Punks and Noah’s Arc and Jumping the Broom and Blackbird and The Skinny, and I’m giving you gay characters on The Chi and P-Valley, and Being Mary Jane, and now even more Noah’s Arc. So yeah, I’ll take it.

Every artist in this industry has a moment where they’ve got to decide which road they’re going to go on. And I distinctly remember being in my early 20s working at MTV, when you and I first met, and I had written the script for Blackbird, which of course I wouldn’t shoot that movie for another 20 years or something. I wrote that script in the early ’90s.

MW: I read it in the early ’90s.

POLK: Exactly. I was trying to decide what to write next, and I was like, “What do I write?” And I was like, “I need to write something that’s going to sell, and what can I do?” And I asked a friend of mine, Rikki Beadle Blair, the British theater legend, “What should I write next?” And he said the words that I then have really lived my entire career by, which is, “Write the story that only you can tell.” And that’s when I literally went and wrote Punks over the next eight days.

I remember having a very conscious conversation with myself, “Well, okay, what kind of career do you want? What do you want to do? Because you can easily pivot and go write,” and I could insert the names of all the popular Black movies that got made at that time, you know what they were. We’re not still talking about them 20 years later. And I remember saying, “At the end of what you hope will be a long career, do you want to look back and see a career of insert-random-movie or do you want to have some work that kind of matters?”

And I’ve got to say, people still talk about Punks and what that movie meant to them, people of a certain age, and certainly Noah’s Arc, everyone talks about Noah’s Arc still to this day and what it meant. And again, we’re here with a new movie 20 years later. So yeah, that’s been my thing. And so, to have this as a legacy, it’s like if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I’ve made a mark as an artist, and that’s really cool. The beautiful thing is that I’m still going, I’ve still got some miles left on these tires, and I’m still working and making stuff. As long as I can do that, I’m going to keep going on my mission to keep telling our stories and hopefully tell even more interesting and different new stories moving forward.

MW: Something I’ve always appreciated about the character Noah, and it’s also appreciating Darryl Stephens’ performance, is how gracefully he blends the masculine and feminine, which triggers some people. He is more extra than a lot of people would be, or would take in their own daily lives, but I think it’s important that he is that and has remained that. What does that mean to you?

POLK: Darryl is a wonderful actor, and over the years, he’s become even a better actor. It’s an interesting case, because we just did yesterday — it’ll be on YouTube by the end of this week I’m told — we did a panel at Screen Actors Guild, SAG-AFTRA panel, me and Darryl, Jensen, and Christian. It was very interesting conversations about the whole history of the show and everything. And Darryl specifically, that character was, it was my creation. Darryl, in real life, was always kind of just a regular guy. He certainly had feminine traits, and that, like I said, is just who he was, and Noah was, obviously, over the top, intentionally over the top. The backlash that this show did get when it first premiered was sort of like, “Oh, all these characters are too feminine. Where’s the representation for the masculine gays? It’s always just these queens.”

That backlash that we got was the very reason why I created Noah the way that I did. Because at the time, what we used to see was the gay characters historically were the clowns, the jokesters. They’d be the queeny waiter or whatever. They were just there for some kind of funny window dressing. And then, there was this change, maybe that probably started in the ’80s into the ’90s, where gay rights and movement started, and we started pushing back on these things. So, then the industry did its shift, and suddenly it became about these sort of hyper-masculine gay characters, where if they didn’t tell you they were gay, you wouldn’t really know. And I’m talking about the Six Feet Under‘s and all of that. That was then the wave.

MW: The Making Love gays.

POLK: Exactly. Making Love, which was a seminal movie in my adolescence. So there was a real, almost disdain for anything feminine or queeny. So, I created Noah specifically to push back against that, because it’s like, “You’re not going to try to sweep the queens under the rug. We’re the ones, we’re the front line warriors. What the fuck are you talking about? The reason we even have gay rights is because of us. Fuck that.”

So it’s interesting now, I think, where the pendulum has swung all over the place. And I think what’s been nice is how the character now, twenty years later, really blends the two things. Watching the movie at the premiere the other day, and hearing the audience respond to specific outfits and things, I was like, “Okay, this is cool.” There’s a particular dinner scene where he’s wearing a really kind of blousey top, and it’s like, “Okay.” So yeah, it’s still fun to play with that stuff. And I think it’s nice how we kind of have evolved. Obviously there’s still backlash. Now we’re mad at drag queens, and “trans is bad” and all this craziness, but c’est la vie.

MW: Where do comparisons to other shows sit with you, specifically Sex and the City?

POLK: I love that comparison. I created the show [with] the idea was I’m going to do a Black, gay Sex and the City. These were the words in my mind as I stood in the El Rey Theatre at the opening night of L.A. Black Pride in 2003: “Oh wow, look at this crowd of people. Look at this viable audience. No one’s doing stuff for us. I’m going to do a Black, gay Sex and the City, period.”

So I absolutely do not mind that conversation or that comparison. Again, my hope is that — like these other shows that we are often compared to or mentioned in the same breath as, Queer as Folk, L Word, Sex and the City — we too will get our effing reboot. [Laughs.] We deserve it. I think the movie proves that these stories are here and they’re fun. People are going to love it. So hopefully we can follow in the footsteps of all these other shows.

MW: I was going to ask about that, too, because it’s a really fortunate thing to have your cast still intact and working, and camera-ready. Including yourself, do you all just snap back into the rhythm, or does it take a little time?

POLK: We did kind of snap back. It’s like a family reunion. They kind of fall back into the rhythm. That’s another thing they were talking about in this SAG-AFTRA event, in terms of getting back together. There were little things that I realized later, like you come in expecting it to be exactly like it was, but you realize, “Oh, wait a minute now. These people are 20 years older.”

So for example, we have these elaborate drag dance numbers in the movie that are brilliantly choreographed by Christian Vincent, who plays Ricky, who’s also a dancer and a choreographer. But the reality is, again, Rodney, who plays Alex, and some of these other characters, these aren’t twenty-year olds like they were, or thirty-year olds even like they were. I didn’t think about those things, because it just felt like, “Oh, here we are again.” But then you realize as you’re doing it, everybody’s different now. Three of our cast lead actors are parents themselves. One of them has two infants. One of them has a toddler, grade school, and one of them has a kid about to graduate from high school. So they’re all different and in beautiful ways. It really was just about making a movie that maintains the essence of what the show was, but brings it into this new decade.

MW: This was an L.A.-based production originally, and now you guys shoot in Atlanta. What for you is different shooting in ATL versus L.A., and what about this very heated conversation about how the industry, Hollywood, is not necessarily in Hollywood anymore, that it’s dispersed?

POLK: Listen, since season one of Noah’s Arc, when the first day that we went out on location, shooting on the beach, that scene in the first episode when they’re rollerskating and the friends meet Wade for the very first time. The first day we went on location, the Teamsters, they shut it down, because MTV was kind of still in that, not really non-union, and the unions were not having it. Season two, we were shipped off to Vancouver, and then Jumping the Broom, we couldn’t even afford to shoot in Vancouver. We shot in Nova Scotia. Then, when I came back to TV, everything has been in Atlanta, Being Mary Jane, P-Valley, now Noah’s Arc. The Chi was in Chicago — I worked on a season of The Chi.

So I hate it. It would be a dream to shoot something in Los Angeles. And I think it’s ridiculous that a state as wealthy as fucking California, the fourth-largest GDP in the world, can’t just put the money down and bring production back here. It’s insane. This is what the other states have done. They’ve put the money down, they’ve committed the resources to bring production there. L.A. can do the fucking same thing, and they better, because it’s drying up. All these stages are empty. There’s an office at Raleigh Studios that I work at sometimes, and all those stages are empty. I walk past them every day, and I’m just saying, “What the fuck?”

MW: Yesterday, I was moderating a discussion for a film by Elegance Bratton. Elegance and his producer, Chester Algernal Gordon, were there. A couple of weeks ago, we had Tarell Alvin McCraney on the cover of this magazine. This is, I guess, a “father of gay Black cinema question.” Do you feel in community with other Black queer filmmakers, or does it feel like a lonely road?

POLK: Yeah, absolutely. I’m in community with all of them. I know all of them. They’re all incredible. And I very lovingly and jokingly will reference this incredible Nicki Minaj line, where she says, “All these bitches is my sons,” right?

I jokingly say that, but the reality is literally every single one of these amazing, incredible, successful, fabulous, brilliant Black queer artists are fans of the work and have told me to my face, whether it’s from Jeremy O’Harris, Michael R. Jackson, all the theater kids, down to Lena Waithe, who’s become a really, really lovely friend of mine as well. To Justin Simien, another one, Tarell. Elegance and Chester, who are dear friends, everyone. I met Elegance when he was still at NYU, and he was a fan then. You know what I mean?

So it’s incredible to see these artists flourishing and having these amazing careers, making this amazing work, and to know that I had anything — even a small part — to do with inspiring them, the way that Spike Lee inspired me when I read that She’s Gotta Have It book, it changed my life. That’s where I learned what film school was and how you become a director, what even being a director meant.

One of the things we do as artists is inspire people. The fact that I can be this skinny, tall kid in Mississippi, who then gets inspired by this skinny, Black short kid in New York City, in Brooklyn, or that I can be in a library in Hattiesburg and randomly come upon a book of poetry by an openly gay Greek poet from the 1800s, that then inspires me. There’s this poem I read when I was in college called “Growing in Spirit” by Constantine Cavafy, and it was like a light turned on in my brain. Just the idea that, “Oh, this gay Greek poet in the 1800s wrote some shit that then my gay Black ass in the cradle of racism centuries later can pick up and read and go, ‘Oh my God, this is my manifesto as an artist now. I’m going to do that.'” I printed it out, I put it on my walls in my dorm. I can recite it to you to this day. That is one of the most beautiful things about being an artist — being able to have that kind of effect. It’s incredible. I am amazed by all of them. I’m in awe of what they do.

MW: Justin [at Paramount] had brought up that you guys are collaborating on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Are you directing episodes of Drag Race currently or in the future? What’s happening?

POLK: I don’t know! I’m like, “Wait, what? We’re doing who? Huh?” I’m not sure that they have clued me into this enough for me to talk about it at this point.

MW: Oh, okay.

POLK: They didn’t tell you what it was?

MW: Not precisely.

POLK: Okay. Well, when I find out, I’ll let you know. [Laughs.]

MW: You’re not just playing coy, are you?

POLK: I’m sort of playing coy, but not fully. What I can say is, Paramount Plus and Showtime, the entire team has been incredibly supportive of this project. I mean, it’s like an army of people. I’ve been amazed at how many people have been working on this, through communications and PR, and all this stuff. And the Drag Race family has always been like family. I’ve known those guys since way back when. So the sort of sister alliance through the Paramount connection has always been there. If we go to an event for Paramount, we’re always sitting with the Drag Race people, et cetera. So, yes, hopefully you will see something.

I would love to work with RuPaul in any capacity. I’ll just put that out there. Again, another one that I’m amazed by. I remember, fuck, Ru was out there doing it before it was cool to do. So, to be here all these years later and have all these Emmys, and live in this gorgeous mansion, and have created this franchise that’s around the world that’s bringing drag to all the countries, it’s fucking bananas. It’s like, “Wow.” Yeah.

MW: I think they announced Drag Race Japan today.

POLK: Wow. I know that’s going to be fucking fierce. Those kids are going to turn it.

MW: When Noah’s Arc started, it was on Logo, which at the time was the lone candle in the darkness for queer content. Now there are more streamers, literally, than I can keep track of, and I keep track of them. Has it made it significantly easier to get queer content made and/or distributed, or is it basically the same, but with more people?

POLK: I would just say it’s still hard to get Black queer content made, period. I mean, I’ve written a script for Invisible Life. Classic, groundbreaking, amazing novel. And we’re out there with my producer — Tracy Edmonds is producing — trying to get that thing made. It is still hard to get Black, queer anything made today. Obviously, it’s not hard to get other queer stuff made, because we see it all the time. Everything from Red, White & Royal Blue, to Overcompensating, to the gaysian movie, Fire Island, you know what I mean? So there’s a lot of gay stuff out there. We just ain’t in it. But hopefully that will change. Hopefully that’ll change. I don’t know. I’m still trying and I know others are as well.

MW: I was impressed recently with BET, with their Icon Awards, showing a lot of Pride support. Stuff seems to be changing at certain places, or would you not agree?

POLK: That’s a tough question now. I always question how much should I say? But I just feel like, fuck, what the fuck do I care, right? So we are actively developing Invisible Life at BET. I wrote the script for them. They paid me to write it. The script is done. It’s ready. It’s wonderful.

MW: Just clarifying. We’re talking about E. Lynn Harris’ Invisible Life? [Harris’ landmark 1991 romance novel following the lives of several Black men who are queer and closeted.]

POLK: Yes. For BET Studios. I love BET Studios. I love everybody over there, but right now, kind of what we’ve been told is maybe they don’t think they can make this movie, or they don’t think they’re going to make this movie. There’s some question about is it still relevant? And the kids now, are they just too out to care about a story like this? Which, of course, I think all of that is absolutely hogwash. So those conversations are ongoing.

Meanwhile, we’re also kind of talking to other people, because look, I’m like, “This movie has to get made.” I mean, look, we’re at a point now, too, where this interesting thing has happened, where the King of Black TV, the Greg Berlanti/Ryan Murphy of Black folks, and one of the TV titans, Tyler Perry, has all these amazing shows on and has so much queer content in these shows.

MW: Madea’s Homecoming was a whole coming-out movie.

POLK: Right. So literally, all of these series — Sisters has some gay characters in the periphery. The Oval has some crazy gay shit — the chief of staff is gay, and he’s got a wife. He’s having sex with the crazy gay Secret Service guy who’s obsessed with the other guy, it’s insane. Or his show on Netflix now, Beauty in Black, has some gay characters, where Debbie Morgan’s the mother walking in on her son and he’s fucking with the guy on the couch, and she’s standing there giving the guy his things, “Get the fuck out of the house.” And he’s telling his boyfriend, who’s trying to break up with him, “Yeah, you’re going to miss this ass.” I fucking am here for all of it. I absolutely love it. I thank you, Tyler Perry. I think that’s amazing that you’re including us in all of that programming, and that’s incredible. So I think the world is ready for more stuff like that, that’s really gay centric.

This is the dream of dreams: As an artist, I don’t want a lot of money. Money would be great. I certainly want enough to be comfortable and retire, and not have to worry. But the dream is very simple. To have enough money and clout or power to make the shit that I want to make. That is the dream. Tyler Perry is living the dream. He has enough money, resources, a studio, and everything. That’s obviously very, very rare. That’s the pinnacle. But anything, even a small part of that, if someone said to me tomorrow, if Tyler Perry said to me today, “Look, you have worked 20 years in this industry. You’ve proven yourself time and time again. You’ve made all this stuff. I see you. I appreciate what you’re doing. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Here is $15 million. You can go make three movies, make a TV show, whatever. Here’s the resource, here’s the money. Go make it.” That is like the dream. That is the dream. That is the place I want to get to. Whether it’s Tyler Perry Studios or Harpo, or Shonda or Mara Brock Akil, I don’t care. But that is the fucking dream. Ted Sarandos, whoever it is, that is the dream.

I tell this story all the time, because it is illustrative. Punks and Broken Hearts Club came out at Sundance in the same year. Both lovely films, very similar themes. One is a group of white, gay friends in West Hollywood, one is a group of Black gay friends in West Hollywood. Living, loving, and laughing, and whatever. Sundance is usually the pinnacle. The beginning of a career, filmmakers, white filmmakers go to Sundance, and then the week after that, they’re signed on to direct Batman movies. It happens all the time.

When Black gay Punks came to Sundance, it was crickets. It was complete and total crickets. But white gay Broken Hearts Club and white gay Greg Berlanti — gay, yes, but the white trumps all of that — he goes on to have this incredible career, because doors open for him that did not open for me. So I went on and did my thing and made my indie stuff. I never stop. But that’s just the reality.

And this takes away nothing from [Greg]. He’s a friend. He’s a lovely guy. He’s brilliant. I’m really happy for his success. He’s done amazing things. But that is the reality of the Hollywood situation. So if there’s, what’s the Linda Ronstadt line? “If there’s anyone within the sound of my voice” that has the power to give me some Hollywood creative reparations or some kind of overall deal, where I can go make some shit, that is what I want. That is what I want. So I’m looking at Paramount Plus and Showtime, I’m looking at all these people, or I’m just looking at — fucking, who is the woman that divorced Jeff Bezos and has all this money?

MW: MacKenzie Scott.

POLK: MacKenzie Scott. Like, look, you got money, you trying to do good things. Give me some money and let me go make some more stuff, because I’m continuing to try to change the world. That is what I’m on. That is what, as an artist, I’m about.

Noah’s Arc: The Movie makes its on-air debut June 20, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime, and is available same-day for streaming and on demand for Paramount+ subscribers with SHOWTIME. Visit www.paramountplus.com.

Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom and the original series episodes are available to watch on Paramount+.