An hour before a Wednesday evening show, the actor Andrew Durand clambered up to a platform on the stage of the Longacre Theater and began doing jumping jacks. “When I walk onstage I never want to feel like I walked in off the street,” he said between jumps. “I want some sort of elevation physically.”
Durand, 39, a Broadway regular, is a first-time Tony nominee this year for his role in “Dead Outlaw,” a new musical that tells the improbable true story of Elmer McCurdy, a bandit fatally shot by a sheriff’s posse in 1911. Because his preserved corpse went unclaimed, McCurdy spent the following decades as a sideshow attraction and an occasional movie extra before ending up as a prop in an amusement-park ride.
McCurdy’s unusual life and afterlife mean that Durand spends the first 40 minutes of the show leaping on and off tables, climbing up and down ladders, and hanging upside down. He spends the next 40 minutes standing still, barely breathing when the lights are on him. Before each performance, he puts himself through a 30-minute workout to prepare for all that motion, all that stillness.
“I have all this crazy stuff to do in the show,” he said. “I don’t want my body to go into shock.”
Durand, who has wavy brown hair, a wide forehead and the jawline of a cartoon superhero, grew up in a churchgoing family in a suburb of Atlanta. He saw his first play at 10, at the local community theater. He returned to act, to paint sets, to sell concession stand popcorn. He loved the openness, the silliness and the reverence he felt there. Eventually he recruited his whole family for the annual production of “A Christmas Carol.” An arts high school followed, then a theater conservatory, and not long after he graduated Durand was on Broadway in 2008, as a replacement cast member in “Spring Awakening.”
During that show, Durand didn’t pay much attention to workouts or warm-ups. “I think I had some injuries that I didn’t notice or deal with,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I tore a rotator cuff doing some choreography, but we were kids. We were just partying after the show, hanging out, sleeping in.”
That changed in 2011, when he began to work with Kneehigh Theater, a British company known for its fantastical productions. Kneehigh, which developed its shows at a campus in Cornwall, England, took its warm-ups — a combination of yoga, Pilates and calisthenics — very seriously. Durand learned them by heart. He found that paying attention to his body freed up his acting. “It liberated me in a way because instead of being so cerebral about it, you could just let it all go through your body,” he said.
At the Longacre Theater, some stagehands were working on the elevated platform, so Durand, in a long-sleeved shirt and loose pants, began his routine on the floor. Durand specializes in villains and dummies (Elmer is a bit of both), but in person he is focused, sincere, untiringly affable. He set out a foam roller and a water bottle and executed a series of stretches, paying particular attention to his neck.
In the most famous photograph of Elmer McCurdy, his corpse is posed standing up, hands gnarled, his neck canted to his left. Durand kept it at that same angle all through the show’s 2024 Off Broadway run. Now he switches it up. He did planks, side planks, a Pilates move called push, cross, pull. “I just do everything I can to sort of get my core all lit up,” he said.
That core work is important, especially now that he believes he has injured his back. (He had scheduled an MRI as his physical therapist suspected he had a slipped disk.) The nerve pain doesn’t bother him too much in the first part of the show. But later, when he lies on a coroner’s table, it can really act up. “Sometimes I have to flex and lift up off the table so it doesn’t hurt,” he said.
After his time on the table, Durand has to stand still, very still, the sweat from the first half still dripping down his back, until the curtain call. His muscles cramp, his mouth goes dry, he has to carefully time his deeper breaths, his toe-wiggling, his blinks. It’s the not blinking that’s the hardest, especially during one sequence, lasting nearly a minute, when the lights are trained on Elmer’s face.
It’s during that minute that he feels most connected to Elmer. “I’m really reminded of his humanity in that moment,” Durand said. “I think the audience is too, eventually.” At first viewers laugh. Then they stop laughing, reminded of what this man endured. He knows that he wasn’t a good guy, but Durand loves Elmer. And he wants audiences to root for him, to want the best for him, though that best never arrives.
On his back, Durand did bridges and pelvic lifts. Then he turned onto his stomach for a quick set of push-ups. He moved into squats, burpees and mountain climbers before finishing up on the platform, which was now free. His skin glistened. “I like to feel a little sweat, just a little heat,” he said. He knew that he would pay for it the next morning, when he would wake up stiff, but in those moments before the show he feels like Elmer at the height of his banditry, invincible.
When it was a half-hour before curtain, Durand headed to his dressing room where he would get into costume and into character while he performed a brief vocal warm-up. Five minutes before his call, clutching a bloodstone that his stepsister, Paige Faure, also a Broadway actress, gave him, he thinks about Elmer, dead and alive, and how grateful he is to play him, unblinking.
“I love being an actor,” he said. “I love putting on shows and I love that each one presents new and obscure challenges that I could have never imagined.”
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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