Tom Francis asked to meet on a rugged corner of the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was a bright April day, and in some ways Francis, 25, in a vintage sweater and slacks, looked like any other member of the creative class with a matcha habit. Still, I had picked him out a block away.
Onstage, in Jamie Lloyd’s coruscating Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” his brooding features projected onto a 23-foot-tall screen, Francis looms large. But even here on Roebling Street, the actor, who stands 6-foot-2, with shoulders that would not demean a musk ox, was not exactly small. Francis is nominated for a Tony Award, and to see him pictured alongside his fellow nominees in the leading actor in a musical category is to believe that he could take any of them in a bar fight, maybe more than one at once.
His “Sunset Boulevard” co-star Nicole Scherzinger described him succinctly. “He is a man,” she said in a phone interview. But, she was quick to emphasize, Francis is also a sweetheart, “a 25-year-old teddy bear.”
In “Sunset Boulevard,” Francis stars as Joe Gillis, a dead-behind-the-eyes screenwriter who becomes entangled, in an asphyxiating way, with an aging queen of the silents. Here is the New York Times critic Jesse Green’s take: “Francis, as Joe, does shutdown-cynical-corpse very well.” Yet in person, Francis, who wields those shoulders lightly, is boyish, candid, eager, almost unable to believe his good fortune.
And yes, that good fortune requires him to remain onstage for nearly every moment of a two-and-a-half-hour mega musical, except when he is leading the cast — in wind, in rain, amid tourists — through a portion of the Theater District as he sings the title number outdoors. He ends the show in his underwear, sunken-eyed and covered in blood.
It’s physically exhausting, he’ll admit that, but on a deeper level, he also finds it restful. That’s the calm that comes from performing work he feels he was made to do. The role, which has already won him an Olivier Award, has given him confidence, allowing him to trust his instincts and his powers. Audiences know that Francis is, every inch, a leading man. And now Francis knows it, too.
“Yeah, it’s nice to find something that I feel good doing,” he said.
Matcha in hand, Francis swung north, then west toward the East River. His publicist assured me that he had taken up photography and would be shooting while we walked, but owing to nerves or distraction or a desire to focus on the conversation, his camera stayed in his bag. Still, Francis’s enthusiasm for the neighborhood, where he lived while filming the final season of the hip Netflix psycho killer drama “You,” was palpable. He pointed out favorite restaurants and fat robins, and spoke about his love of cycling across the Williamsburg Bridge, the skyline at his back.
“That’s the time when I take in the fact that I’ve got to Broadway,” he said.
Admittedly, Francis’s path to Broadway has not been especially circuitous or long. Music has always made sense to him. He is severely dyslexic, though this wouldn’t be diagnosed until his late teens, and as a child he struggled in school. But when he played guitar or sang — first with the cathedral choir in his small town in the south of England, then with other choirs — he excelled.
“It was really nice not to be the dumbest kid in the room all the time,” Francis said.
Choral singing led him to youth theater, then to drama school. Onstage, he could forget himself, give himself over to the role. “You can just switch off and hang out in somebody else’s skin for a little bit,” he explained. When Francis said this, earnestly and full of good will, it didn’t sound creepy. (The accent helps.)
He graduated from drama school, ArtsEd in West London in 2020, and despite the pandemic, he began to work almost immediately, in a live-capture performance of “Rent,” a concert version of “Hair,” and the Tom Jones musical “What’s New Pussycat?” He was then a replacement Romeo in the London production of “& Juliet.” When his contract for that show finished, he thought he might rest for a while, work on some original music. Then his agent told him about an audition for a “Sunset Boulevard” revival, which Lloyd would direct.
Francis didn’t know the show, or the 1950 Billy Wilder movie that inspired it, but he knew Lloyd by reputation and was desperate to work with him. Lloyd, who remembered Francis from “Rent,” liked what he heard at the first audition. He kept calling him back and back. (Lloyd said there were four auditions; Francis believes there were nine.) But Lloyd didn’t really need to see more.
“I just knew in an instant that was Joe Gillis,” Lloyd said in a phone interview. That Francis looked more like a noir hunk than a typical musical theater actor helped. (“He wasn’t in any way glossy,” Lloyd said. “He looked a real guy.”) And while Francis isn’t naturally cynical — or naturally a baritone — he let the words and music take him there, with a voice that could go barroom smoky or church-bell clear, which convinced Lloyd and, later, Lloyd Webber.
“I mean, he’s a really good singer,” Lloyd Webber called to tell me.
FRANCIS WAS JUST 22 during those auditions, and 23 when rehearsals began. Scherzinger, who plays the fading star Norma Desmond, remembered meeting him and thinking: “He’s so young. Then I realized the whole cast was so young. I was like, ‘Wow, I really feel like Norma Desmond now, because I feel so old.’”
The show opened in London in the fall of 2023 to rapturous reviews. Talk of a New York transfer was immediate. A month into the run, Lloyd came into Francis’s dressing room and asked him if he would like to go to New York. Francis had known that Scherzinger was a lock; he hadn’t thought that Lloyd would take him as well. But the chemistry between the two of them was undeniable. Offstage, this manifests as a brother-sister closeness. (“He’s a good boy, and I love him,” Scherzinger said.) Onstage, it’s a lot steamier. Lloyd wanted them both.
Francis didn’t have to think about it. “I was like, ‘Hell yes, a thousand times over,’” he said.
The show’s Broadway theater, the St. James, was larger than the London one, and the outside jaunt — during which Francis sings the title number while being filmed live — trickier, though Francis insists that the crowds that gather to watch him are typically polite. (Those crowds are more rapacious at the stage door. Francis doesn’t mind it. “It’s quite a nice feeling knowing you’ve made someone’s day,” he said.) But the demands of the show wore at him. He sings or speaks for perhaps 90 minutes of it. And toward the close of the show he has to scream, gutturally.
“It’s not a sustained note kind of scream, it needs to sound like you’ve been shot,” he said.
That screaming, combined with a case of laryngitis, made for vocal cord damage, which meant that Francis had to miss a week of performances in November. After that, he adjusted his exercise routines and his diet. A nutritionist told him that he was undereating by about a thousand calories per day. He also became a regular at the trendy day spa Bathhouse. “Water and steam are my best friends,” he said. It would be natural for a handsome 20-something to want to explore the New York nightlife, but aside from a good restaurant meal, Francis limits his extracurriculars.
Lloyd appreciates that. “Even with all the temptations in New York, he keeps his feet on the ground and stays focused and disciplined and consistent,” he said. “It’s amazing someone of that age can do that.”
After walking for about an hour, Francis arrived at Marsha P. Johnson State Park, which runs down to the river itself. He sat down on a log and looked out at the Manhattan skyline. “This city,” he said, “it just has my heart.”
Yet it’s an open question how long Francis will stay here. Scherzinger has known this since the first rehearsal. “I said we’ve got to get that face on the screen,” she said. Hollywood has already come calling. The producer Greg Berlanti, having seen Francis in “Sunset Boulevard” in London, cast him in “You,” Francis’s first television role. He played Clayton, a writer who maneuvers against Penn Badgley’s Joe. It doesn’t end well. (Francis joked that if he has a type, it’s writers who die.)
“We would cast him again in a heartbeat,” Berlanti said. “He’s got strength mixed with vulnerability and mystery.” Francis has since spent a couple of days on the set of the upcoming Noah Baumbach movie, “Jay Kelly,” and been cast in Peter Berg’s World War II project, “The Mosquito Bowl.”
“I’m ready to go and try something new,” Francis said. “I really want to have a multifaceted career.”
For now there are the Tony Awards and several more months to go in “Sunset.” And at the moment there was sun on the water and more sun reflecting on skyscraper windows and a smell from the river that wasn’t entirely nice. It all still feels like a dream to him, but it’s a dream in which he belongs — here and on Broadway, and just maybe on the Radio City Music Hall stage where the Tonys will be awarded this year.
“I’m equally confused and just proud of myself,” he said.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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