Broadway actors need to shine in all sorts of ways. Some are obvious (mastering an accent). Some are surprises (mastering a horse). We asked this year’s Tony-nominated performers to describe a skill they had to pick up for a role onstage or onscreen. Here’s what they had to say.
bug
Carrie Coon
“I did a film called ‘The Nest,’ and I had to impersonate a horse trainer. I was not a horse girl — that’s an expensive hobby and we did not do expensive hobbies in my house. So I watched horse trainers give lessons, and I took riding lessons, of course. You cannot tell a lie on a horse. If you rescind your leadership in any way, they just go off into the weeds and start chomping. You really have to stay incredibly present with them. It was a great lesson.”
Every Brilliant Thing
Daniel Radcliffe
“The typewriter stuff in ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ was some of the most stressful stuff as we were starting up. At the beginning of ‘Opening Doors,’ my character is using a typewriter, and the song’s percussion is the sound of letter strikes and carriage returns. So there’s getting all that in all the right places, and I don’t read music. I took a typewriter home and I’d just be in my room bashing away.”
waiting for godot
Brandon J. Dirden
“In ‘Topdog / Underdog,’ learning how to do a three-card monte was so fun. They brought in a magician to show us the overthrow. I hadn’t done it in about 10 years, but my son saw the poster and I brought out some cards and I could still do it.”
liberation
Betsy Aidem
“Taking off all my clothes and putting them back on in front of a live audience, eight times a week. I’m 68 years old. Everybody was almost half my age. I thought, ‘Oh, this is a superpower of mine, that I’m willing to do something like this.’”
Death of a Salesman
Nathan Lane
“For ‘The Frogs,’ I had to do bungee jumping.”
ragtime
Joshua Henry
“When I was in ‘American Idiot,’ I had to dance on newspapers all over the ground. It looked really cool — the newspapers would fly everywhere — but night to night we all looked at each other like, ‘If I just crash, I’m out of the show.’ I left and came back, and one of the conditions was ‘Honestly, I’m cool as long as I don’t have to do that number.’”
Fallen Angels
Rose Byrne
“The technicality of Noël Coward’s language is something that was so daunting to me. I can only liken it to David Mamet. I’m still discovering laughs based on a change of breath.”
Giant
John Lithgow
“I played a butcher once, and got very good at carving meat. It was for a movie I loved that nobody ever heard of called ‘Out Cold.’ They gave me a fabulous carving knife, and I made sausages onscreen. Unfortunately, I saw how the sausage is made, and not only metaphorically.”
The rocky horror show
Rachel Dratch
“For ‘POTUS,’ I had to run! I lost 10 pounds. I had to run around the whole theater at full speed several times a day, and my dressing room was on the third floor. It kept me a lot more active. So that’s an unexpected boon!”
cats: the jellicle ball
André De Shields
“I don’t know that I’ve learned any skills for a show, but I have brought skills! Off Broadway, singing my opening number, I sustained a note for 17 seconds. Now on Broadway, I’m sustaining a note for 27 seconds, and it blows people’s minds. The audience goes nuts. I know then that I can go on.”
death of a salesman
Christopher Abbott
“I can throw a football, and my hand-eye coordination is pretty decent … for an actor. But there is always a fear that it’s going to go offstage. One show, I threw it at Ben [Ahlers] and it hit his leg and went into the audience. Ben just pointed at it, like a toddler, hoping that an audience member would give it back to us. I froze. And then we went back a few lines and kept going.”
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Ruben Santiago-Hudson
“I play Bynum, who is a conjure man — a person who can create spells. So I learned a lot about roots and sticks and bones and powders. If I was going to give a young lady a mojo hand — a bag with herbs and roots and powders — I wanted to know what that meant.”
The Rocky Horror Show
Stephanie Hsu
“Breathing into your feet, into the ground and letting the earth support you. I learned that on this show because I’m in a corset. I had to really figure out different ways to breathe.”
chess
Hannah Cruz
“When I did ‘Suffs’ at the Public, our choreographer was like, ‘You have tricks, right?’ I’m not a dancer! I don’t have tricks! Our tricks ended up just being me rolling around the stage and somersaulting. It reminded me that this can unlock the secret childhood parts of ourselves that we’ve forgotten.”
Titaníque
Layton Williams
“My first ever job was ‘Billy Elliot’ in middle school, so I had to learn how to do everything to such a degree — backflip, splits, turns. I was thrown in at the deep end, but now, thank goodness, all them trips and dips and flips, still got it, baby!”
liberation
Susannah Flood
“I once had to learn how to speak Japanese. Very hard. I had to speak in a Japanese dialect for an entire play. I was in grad school. I had a dialect coach, and it happened that there were some graduate students who spoke Japanese so I could also sit down with them. And I watched a lot of movies — all the Japanese auteur directors, and anime. It was really cool.”
Oedipus
Mark Strong
“Doing provincial accents in the U.K. is quite a tough ask. I did a thing called ‘Our Friends in the North,’ with Daniel Craig, and we all had to be Geordies, which are people form Newcastle, and the accent is very particular. I found a series called ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet,’ and I just had it on a loop.”
Ragtime
Caissie Levy
“Absolutely the weirdest skill I had to develop was to throw a pot in ‘Ghost [the Musical].’ I had to push out a mobile version of a potter’s wheel onto center stage, with real clay, and throw a pot live while singing ‘Unchained Melody’ with the ghost of my boyfriend behind me. I loved it. And I’ve literally never done it since.”
becky shaw
Alden Ehrenreich
“It’s the level of concentration when you’ve done it a thousand times and you’re exhausted spiritually and emotionally. It’s being able to live through each moment as new. That’s the muscle that is the most profound.”
Fallen Angels
Kelli O’Hara
“One night, our director said, ‘Why don’t you fall down the stairs or something?’ We didn’t rehearse anything. I got to the top of the stairs, and I just let my body flat, and, thankfully, the carpet was slippery. There were still little jagged pieces of wood that gave me scratches and bruises, and we’ve slowly but surely smoothed out the set so that I’m not getting hurt. But yeah, you just try it, and it worked!”
two strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
Sam Tutty
“I had to learn how to do a tie for ‘Dear Evan Hansen.’ I was 21, and had never done a tie. Evan ties a tie in front of the entire audience. We were in the middle of rehearsals, and I had to say, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ I had to Google it, and then our director helped me as well. When you learn that way, you learn for life. It’s embedded in my very soul.”
Marjorie prime
Danny Burstein
“I had to learn American Sign Language for a film, ‘Nor’easter.’ It was extremely difficult. I went to three different teachers, and when I got to the set, it was an indie film, and they didn’t have an ASL person, so I was the expert, and I would have to stop myself in the middle of a take and go, ‘Nope, sorry, I said giraffe instead of boardwalk.’”
ragtime
Nichelle Lewis
“One of the best skills that I’ve had to learn is how to come down from a role. I had to learn how to just bring myself back to ground level when I’m done with the show. I go to my room and just say a mantra: I am strong, I am beautiful, I am smart. And maybe breathe.”
death of a salesman
Laurie Metcalf
“I had to do research into taking morphine in ‘Long Day’s Journey.’ I read different ways it can manifest itself, and one of them is horniness, and so I decided to use that. One of the times when my character, Mary Tyrone, came down the steps and saw her husband, I chose to have her very turned on, and he was horrified. So I thought that was a bold choice.”
ragtime
Ben Levi Ross
“I had to get a real cast put on for ‘Dear Evan Hansen,’ and conquer my fear of the Dremel sawing it off every night. When it first happened, I was like, ‘This is scary!’ We weren’t in a doctor’s office. It was the hair guy, who had a razor to my arm every night. But by show 300 I was like, ‘Go on, whatever.’”
Schmigadoon!
Sara Chase
“Definitely the strangest thing I had to learn was to talk with fake braces. In ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’ my character went into the bunker with braces and still had them decades later. It was not only impossible to talk with, and it hurt, but that’s how I met Jon Hamm. Did not feel sexy.”
The Rocky Horror Show
Luke Evans
“I have to remove my wig at the end of the show, onstage, and it sounds like an easy thing to do, but it’s actually become very technical — pulling off a wig without pulling off my mic on my face, and make it look effortless and also painful and vulnerable. My character is peeling off the layers that he’s hidden himself behind throughout the whole show. So if the microphone comes off, it’s another crack in his armor.”
Titaníque
Marla Mindelle
“I’ve had to learn a whole arm language for Celine Dion. She’s always conducting an orchestra. To the public. To herself.”
ragtime
Brandon Uranowitz
“Something that I had to work really hard on, that has opened up the world for me as an artist, was letting go of what other people think about me, and making sure that I’m not doing this for validation from other people. And so I think a skill that I’ve learned over the years is to quiet the ego and just let the work speak for itself.”
schmigadoon!
Ana Gasteyer
“There are a lot of stairs in theaters. The first two months is just building your quads back up. Because you go up and down and up and up. I’ll get home and I’m like, ‘What am I doing with this character that’s so sore?’ It’s all the stairs.”
The Balusters
Richard Thomas
“The skill that I picked up on this show is how to destroy a set with a piece of wood. It’s a skill that I never had before, and that I never knew I had. And I’m happy to say I’m actually very good at it.”
two strangers (carry a cake across New York)
Christiani Pitts
“Climbing! For ‘King Kong’! I had to climb his back, and he was 20 feet tall, and his back was like a rock-climbing wall. I had to not only learn how to climb, but to make it look dangerous while being extremely safe, and singing while all this is happening. Crazy.”
giant
Aya Cash
“I learned how to ice-skate, a bit, for ‘The Girl From Plainville,’ and then it got cut, so I never did it. I convinced them to do Zumba because it was cheaper to shoot, and we shot it and then that was cut as well.”
Punch
Will Harrison
“This show, definitely the running around that [onstage] ramp, which is not only slanted but tilted inwards. It was an insane act to try to run around it without twisting an ankle every night.”
chess
Nicholas Christopher
“I had learn how to shave people with a straight razor for ‘Sweeney Todd.’ I practiced with my own face. I cut myself many times. When you have any one wrong movement, it’s gonna be a nick, for sure.”
the lost boys
Ali Louis Bourzgui
“I’ve never really been much of a stunt guy, and this show forced me to learn. I got serious about strength training. I started eating really healthy food. And they taught us how to do flying. At first I felt like a baby in one of those doorway bouncy things. I felt so dumb. And then slowly your body starts to adapt. Now I feel really confident with those wires, and I know how to move.”
the lost boys
Shoshana Bean
“The cooking choreography in ‘Waitress’ was crazy. She’s making two different pies, and there were these fruits, and so much stuff. They were like, ‘It’s prop hell!’ and I was like, ‘Don’t worry guys, I played Elphaba, I know how to handle props.’And sure enough, I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m going to get this.’ Sara Bareilles was like, ‘You’ve got to go in your kitchen, and drill it over and over.’ And that’s what I did.”
chess
Bryce Pinkham
“In college, I had to learn how to juggle for a Molière play called ‘The Flying Doctor.’ I remember my teacher being like, ‘Do you juggle?’ I was like, ‘Yes, of course, I juggle.’ I did not. So I had to learn to do that. I still do it to this day, as part of my warm-up.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
The post 38 Tony Nominees Reveal the Strangest Skills They’ve Picked Up appeared first on New York Times.
