Interview by Matteo Pini 
Portrait courtesy of Ben Mora

MP You used to be a staffer on the Bernie Sanders campaign. Do you think this background has sharpened your eye for the politics of the bedroom?

BM I don’t want to be too serious about it because the show is about having fun and roasting one another, but at the end of the day, all housing is political. As rents go up and the US turns increasingly right-wing, you see the material effects: spaces are becoming smaller, and they’re also exceedingly politicised. Everyone has flags in their rooms now, from trans flags to bear flags to straight guys with baroque political flags. When you’re talking about the bare essentials of how someone lives, it will always reflect the present moment. In some ways, the show is also about my own experience living in all kinds of horrible housing. I’ve lived in attics where I’ve had to make my own walls, and when I first moved out at 17, my bed was a pile of clothes that I wrapped up with a fitted sheet and moulded to look like a mattress. I slept on that for a year and a half. When I was working on the Bernie campaign, I was sleeping in the office of a former Staples in Dearborn, Michigan, on a twin mattress I had bought, with a printer next to my head. The realisation of how many people live in ad-hoc bedrooms or weirdly divided houses made me realise there’s a huge market there.

MP What room are you calling me from?

BM I’m in a tenement my friend has in Chinatown in Manhattan. The toilet and shower are in the hallway, and I’m balancing my laptop on toilet paper rolls, but it’s really cheap for what it is. Seven of us each pay $300 a month. Everyone refuses to buy anything. We currently have two bowls, one cup and no silverware.

MP Interior Motives has come at an interesting moment for snooping into other people’s rooms. We’ve reached a point of exhaustion with uncritical showcases of celebrity interiors, and in transforming the show’s sleuthing into a participatory game, you’ve made the format feel exciting again.

BM In some ways, it felt inevitable to me. Everyone is so hypercritical about other people’s spaces – we’re all constantly judging the most minute details of people’s rooms on social media. I think people are really tired of top-down communication, where everything is so clearly coordinated with a press rollout. It came from that question: how do you make viewers the subject of conversation? By having their own interiors as the starting point for discussion.

MP You ask people to submit photos of their bedroom for judgement, as well as their fridge. Why the fridge?

BM I couldn’t do the bathroom because it’s too gendered, and I thought the fridge was another good entry point into painting a picture of someone. The fridge is just as intimate as the bedroom, if not more. Diets are highly indicative of who you are. For one of the international episodes we did, there was a gay guy who only had boutique alcoholic seltzers in his fridge. There was not an ounce of food in there. We are switching it up, though. Right now, we’re asking for photos of people’s cars, or a photo of their workplace. We did an episode that included a screenshot of someone’s Instagram Explore page – and the clock was in military time. We were all already assuming this was a lesbian’s phone.

MP Other than flags, have there been any recurrent objects?

BM The gaming chair is the most common, something I think that most people immediately assume is a transgender piece of furniture. Blackout curtains are another big one, especially in big cities, which people also assume belong to a trans woman – not to throw it to the dolls again. If you’re staying up partying and doing drugs until 6am, you’re going to want to sleep in. Gay men will always make their own salad dressing from scratch, so if you see a store-bought salad dressing, you know it’s probably not a gay guy. Anime is another huge one, but to be honest, a lot of these trends are more indicative of a generational divide than of any particular gender or sexuality. That’s the funniest thing about it: the conceit of the show doesn’t even work. I’ve been playing it twice a week for six months at this point, and I’ve not gotten any better at guessing. It makes you realise the daily clocking you do of other people is almost always wrong.

MP What has been the most dissociative room you’ve seen?

BM There was a bedroom with a tree growing through it. The lengths to which people are pushed due to housing costs are quite shocking. There are many inexplicable things that make functional sense for these people. I once saw someone stacking a bunch of baseball hats on the handle of a vacuum cleaner.

MP You’ve started to do more international episodes. What commonalities are you finding, if any, across global queer life?

BM There are certain patterns that transcend borders and culture, mostly because of Instagram and the shared traits of people who listen to podcasts. There is a certain cachet of cultural taste that is universal. The tenderqueer is an American export you can find everywhere. Extremely rarely, we get someone who earns a healthy six or seven figures. It’s usually these white tech gays who are rave-hopping psychopaths. It does show that there’s a kind of capitalist compliance that gay men can pull off that their straight counterparts can’t. It’s a funny pattern I’ve seen recurring.

MP In ten years, we might look back on the show as a matrix through which one can view the material reality of 2020s queer culture.

BM That part is important to me because queer people are not streamlined and collected into one single source. It’s nice to be able to catalogue this time period for queer people because it feels like so many things are changing. Hopefully we can look back, and we’ll all have bigger, nicer apartments with bed frames, clean floors and trash cans. But if not, at least there is this time capsule of what the culture looked like in 2025.

MP It’s not as if you’re finger-wagging.

BM Some people have taken the show like a Jordan Peterson lecture on how to live, which is not the intention. I don’t have a bedframe, nor have I ever really had one. I am in no way stylish, but I know that style is a decisive factor in everyone’s lives. The biggest misunderstanding is that this is in some way instructional, rather than purely comedic. I’m basically living in an orphanage right now. .