Trivia / Pose

• Actor-Shared Background: In 2021, Billy Porter revealed that he's been living with HIV since 2007, much like his character, Pray Tell. He also revealed that, like Pray, he'd been molested by his stepfather as a child.
• Casting Gag:
  • In American Horror Story: Cult (also created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk), Evan Peters plays an insane Trump supporter. Here, he plays an employee of the Trump Organization and actually has meetings with Trump.
  • In American Horror Story: Murder House, Evan Peters played a character who rejected the advances of a character played by Kate Mara. Here, Peters and Mara play a married couple.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Both Billy Porter and Mj Rodriguez worked as musical theater actors before being on the show (with Porter being a Tony Award winner), so naturally, the two get to belt it out in a musical duet in "Love Is The Message".
  • "Love's In Need of Love Today" allows Porter and Rodriguez another opportunity to sing. It also gives Patti LuPone an excuse to perform a Broadway number.
• Cast the Expert: Jason A. Rodriguez is a sought-after voguing instructor and ballroom performer before he's an actor, and he doubles as a choreographer on the show. Fittingly, his character Lemar is one of the fiercest dancers in the cast.
• The Danza: Elektra and Blanca's legal surnames (Jackson and Rodriguez, respectively) happen to be the same surnames as their respective actresses, Dominique Jackson and Mj Rodriguez.
• Creator Backlash: On the eve of the third and final season, writer-director-executive producer Janet Mock called out Ryan Murphy and Steven Canals for underpaying her and Our Lady J for their work on the show, and also expressed disdain for Murphy's and Canals's writing in the first two episodes.
• Descended Creator: Our Lady J, one of the producers on the show, appears in several of the episodes as a ballgoer named Sherilyn.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Pray Tell is HIV positive and Billy Porter announced in 2021 of also being HIV positive.
• Follow the Leader: The series drove a surge of interest in the ballroom scene, which inspired Legendary, a full-on reality competition series based on ball culture. The show premiered in 2020 on HBO Max and timed its second season to the final season of Pose (and aired prominent ads during Pose as well).
• Irony as She Is Cast: In the season 2 finale, "In My Heels", Pray Tell has difficulty walking in high heels. Not only has Pray Tell's actor, Billy Porter, worn heels to public events, but he played the main role in Kinky Boots, where he had to wear high-heeled boots.
• Reality Subtext:
  • The final dance in "Never Knew Love Like This Before" was the last scene Angelica Ross filmed for the season, and at the time, no one was sure that there'd be a third season. All the cheering, celebration, and affection in the scene was genuine.
  • "Take Me to Church" was heavily inspired by actor Billy Porter's life, with a bit of wish-fulfillment: whereas Pray ends up disclosing his HIV-status to his mother and aunts, in real life, Porter elected not to tell his mother that he was HIV-positive, not wanting her to spend the rest of her life worrying about him.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Damon was written out of the final season because Ryan Jamal Swain wanted to take time off to grieve for his sister, who was fatally shot in July 2020.