I first met Chris Phillips somewhere around 2016 or 2017 when we both took Charlene Lite's Yoga Class at Crunch Fitness in NYC.

While it took me several classes to get the nerve to say hello, I finally introduced myself one day and we started to become friends.

We lost touch after Chris moved to Los Angeles, but when I received the press release about his show, This Is Where It Ends, I immediately reached out for an interview and I am thrilled Chris said YES!

In this interview, Chris answered my call to share:

• What he hopes audiences come away with after seeing This Is Where It Ends
• Which part of the play was the most challenging to write
• Lies that he has told himself
• When there was a time he got frustrated with being a playwright/screenwriter
• So much more

Connect with Chris: Instagram

This Is Where It Ends is a contemporary riff on Sex, Lies & Videotape and one of the featured LGBTQ plays at this year’s Broadway Bound Theatre Festival.

In This is Where It Ends, a married couple from Los Angeles, Stephen and James, invite Stephen’s brash actor friend, Kody, and James’s former fraternity brother, Ellis – once an entitled entrepreneur, now a spiritually-minded, recovering sex addict -- for a weekend at their Palm Springs home to celebrate James’s forty-fifth.

Unknown to Stephen, James engages in extramarital adventures with anonymous hookups and Kody, while Stephen, increasingly frustrated in his role as ornamental house-husband, finds himself first unnerved by Ellis’s blunt honesty, then drawn to his refreshing candor.

As the weekend progresses, the walls come down and the gloves come off as the four men bristle under the weight of the roles all of them have played for far too long.

This Is Where It Ends will run for 4 performances ONLY from July 30, 2025-August 3, 2025 at AMT Theater in NYC. Click Here for tickets! 

1. This summer, your show, This Is Where It Ends, will make its NYC premiere during the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival. What are you looking forward to most about this mounting of your show? We’ve got a terrific cast, so I’m looking forward to seeing them make these characters flesh and blood, which is always a thrill.

I just moved back to NYC after ten years in L.A. doing film projects, so working with New York stage actors and getting immediate energetic feedback from a live audience again will be a treat. I’ve missed that.

2. What do you hope audiences come away with after seeing the show? My hope is always for an audience to identify with what I’m putting out there, like they’re seeing parts of themselves on stage or on screen. Who or what they identify with is their business, but I hope they walk away thinking they’re not alone with whatever they might be struggling with at the moment.

And I hope they have lots to talk about after they walk out of the theatre. I like being provocative, so whether they love it or hate it, I hope it makes an impression.

3. What was the hardest scene in the play to write & what made it so challenging? The hardest scene for me is the one in which two longtime friends finally pull the blinders off and unload their pent-up resentments on each other. I needed them to be as nasty as only people who know each other way too well can be.

I didn’t want to soften the moment or hold back on pressing a weak spot, which is tough. I love all my characters and don’t want anyone being cruel to them! But those explosions are exciting – you can feel the audience leaning in because people are saying what they really think.

Chris Phillips, Photo Credit: Katherine Kirkpatrick

4. How long did it take you to write This Is Where It Ends, from idea to inception? I tend to let ideas bake for a while before I fire off a first draft, but this one came out super-fast. The play is inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies & videotape, which is one of the biggest influences on my writing overall.

I watch that movie at least once every few years, and the last time I watched it, I realized I had come to the conclusion that the entire world, including myself, seemed pretty full of shit. How do you live in a world that you think is full of shit? That was the spark. It all came out in a matter of days, and hasn’t changed all that much. I knew these characters pretty well.

5. Press notes state that This Is Where It Ends is a "provocative new play that upends the tropes of gay theatre with a blunt look at marriage, friendship, and the lies gay men tell themselves and each other." What are some lies that you've told yourself? Oh, gosh, how much time do you have? I’ve been sober for a long time, but before I hit that hard left turn, I lied to myself about everything: what kind of person I was, what I liked, what I wanted, what I thought was fun.

I pretty much let mainstream gay culture tell me what I thought about myself, and… Let’s just say mainstream gay culture can send some unhealthy messages about what’s valuable. Which is no different than mainstream straight culture, right?

When I finally took the time to get to know myself without alcohol clouding my thoughts, I realized I didn’t know who I was at all, I just had this sort of paste-up personality that I didn’t even like. Those are the lies that most wear on you.

6. The show also centers around Stephen, an increasingly frustrated house-husband. When has there been a time you got frustrated with being a playwright/screenwriter or another role in your life? Right before I left New York for L.A., I kind of hit bottom, where I was really questioning what I was doing with my life. When I came to New York the first time, I was on a high. I’d had a couple plays that had some success, I landed an agent, I felt like shit was about to happen, you know? And then for the next four years – crickets. It was tough.

And in L.A., I got some attention for some scripts I wrote, but while everyone seemed to like my writing, no one was willing to take a chance on producing it. I had to get really clear on why I was writing.

Now, I’m pretty Zen about the whole thing. I figure whoever needs to see my work will be the ones to see it.

Chris Phillips and his husband, Aaron
Photo courtesy of Chris Phillips' Social Media

7. The press notes also talk about "the walls come down and the gloves come off..." What walls came down for you as you were writing this show? It’s funny – I met my future husband right around the time I wrote the first draft. And I don’t know that this play has a whole lot of positive things to say about the institution of marriage, at least as it’s traditionally played out.

Writing This Is Where It Ends made me get brutally honest about what kind of relationship I wanted. I’d rather be single forever than in a marriage like the one in this play! I never thought I’d ever want to get married, much less that I’d meet somebody I wanted to marry by our second date. But what do I know?

8. Who or what inspired you to become a playwright/screenwriter? I’ve written plays since I was a kid, so I guess it was always innate – I was drawn to creating theatre and film for as long as I can remember. But seeing sex, lies & videotape as an adolescent, and probably The Breakfast Club right before that, was when I actively thought, “I want to write something that gets real the way those movies get real.”

I wanted to write something that made someone else feel seen the way those movies made me feel seen. They embraced asking difficult questions, and they both end with question marks, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I like throwing those out to the audience.

9. In addition to This Is Where It Ends, your first feature-length film as writer & director, Bleed Like Me, is currently out on the festival circuit. What do you get from screenwriting that you don't get from playwriting? I think the visual nature of screenwriting is my favorite part of it. I just love the form. I love writing action lines, telling the story with images, writing in cuts and shots while stopping just short of directing from the page.

Directing my own films was a huge help in this regard. I love close-ups, I love guiding what the audience sees and doesn’t see, what gets noticed. I want reading one of my screenplays to feel like you’re watching the movie.

Playwriting’s pretty different, it’s a different language. I look at playwriting as a blueprint so a director and actors can really go to town. I’m not as dynamic visually in my plays as in screenplays. Dialogue is king in a play, at least the ones that I love best.

10. How does your process, if at all, for playwriting differ from that of screenwriting? With my plays, I tend to work backwards from character. I’m so envious of writers who can come up with a great plot hook. I start with a character I want to write about, and then build the story around them, always with the question, “What is the most transformative period or moment of this person’s life?”

Screenwriting is similar, but I tend to start with a visual bang, like, what’s the opening image of this story? And just as important, what is the final image we see of this story?

With playwriting, the images aren’t as important. That’s up to the director. My job is to build the relationships.

11. What is something we didn't get to talk about in this interview that you'd like my audience to know about you? The last play I had up in New York features this scene where one character goes off on every identifiable “type” of gay man in a long rant, and it always got applause or hoots from other gay men in the audience. I could feel the release they experienced, with a character saying things they might think, but never verbalize. That crystallized my voice as a writer, and I knew I wanted to keep doing that forever.

It’s like, “Okay, you might be shamed in real life by acknowledging these thoughts, but you won’t be shamed here.” Let’s get it out and deal with it. That’s what theatre is for me. I want to walk out of any play a different person than when I walked in. I don’t know if I can achieve that for an audience every time, but I’m gonna give it my best shot.

Chris Phillips, Photo Credit: Katherine Kirkpatrick

More on Chris Phillips:

Chris Phillips is a playwright, screenwriter & director whose plays have been staged on both coasts in venues such as Celebration Theatre, SoHo Playhouse and the Cherry Lane Theater. He’s directed 7 short films -- 4 from his own scripts -- screening at festivals such as Outfest Los Angeles and the California Independent Film Festival, where he won Best Director of a Short, and the Austin After Dark Film Festival, where his short won Best Drama.

Chris is a two-time GLAAD Media Award nominee; a finalist for the Warner Bros. TV Writers Workshop; a semi-finalist for the NBC Universal Emerging Writers Fellowship; a finalist for the WB TV Pilot award at the Austin Film Festival; and a top-50 semi-finalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship.

His first feature-length film as writer-director, Bleed Like Me, is currently out at festivals.