When you’re a bonafide movie star like George Clooney or Denzel Washington, you get to call the shots. When Marvel or Star Wars makes you the face of their billion-dollar franchise, as with Robert Downey Jr. and Adam Driver, respectively, you could subsequently star in any movie or TV show your heart desires. The same goes for other leading men of the big and small screen like Keanu Reeves, Adam Driver and Peter Gallagher. These are actors who can pick their projects.
So why are all these A-listers picking the same project, one that comes as a surprise to agents and audiences alike? More to the point, why are they all decamping from Hollywood to the New York theater scene to do plays?
It’s no exaggeration: Tinseltown is emptying. Three of the aforementioned superstars are making their Broadway debuts in the next year: Clooney will lead a stage adaptation of his 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck this spring; Reeves will play opposite his Bill & Ted co-star Alex Winter in the seminal Waiting for Godot in fall 2025; and McNeal, a new play tackling artificial intelligence and starring Downey Jr., opens on Monday. Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, both Broadway veterans, return together with Othello in February, while Kenneth Branagh will helm a different Shakespearean tragedy starting in October. Adam Driver is joining Branagh in the Off-Broadway realm with a Kenneth Lonergan revival that kicked off this week.
They say three is a trend, but that’s seven already, and the announcements keep coming. Just this month, Zachary Quinto (Cult of Love), John Mulaney (All In: Comedy About Love) and Brendan Fraser (Grangeville) all announced their own shows coming to NYC. It almost seems like the leading lights of Hollywood aren’t just flocking, but fleeing to the East Coast.
The thing all of these men have in common, besides their apparent zest for the stage, is that they absolutely do not need to be subjecting themselves to the rigors of a New York theater schedule. George Clooney could pull a rom-com out of a hat instead of putting it all on the stage eight times a week. Keanu Reeves has enough Matrix and John Wick money that his Samuel Beckett check will likely be a drop in the bucket. Peter Gallagher, who has been every Millennial’s favorite TV dad (on The O.C.) and every empty nester’s favorite TV husband (on Grace and Frankie), has nothing to prove after a prolific career that is in its fifth decade.
And yet, they’re all currently being drawn to the sweltering stage lights of Broadway.
“I read somewhere that the three most stressful occupations for the human body are a test pilot, a soldier in combat and an actor on opening night,” Peter Gallagher told InsideHook earlier this month in between rehearsals for Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron’s stage adaptation of her memoir, which begins performances Thursday. “And I believe that. There are things that your body releases to keep you alive in stressful situations that are coursing through your bloodstream. But it’s also what amplifies the experience.”
Before I called Gallagher to talk about his return to Broadway, and his thoughts about why so many of today’s biggest box office draws are joining him in the wings, I expected him to trot out certain clichés about the unique joys of live theater: the immediate feedback from the audience; the pleasure of digging into new material from a great writer (Ephron has written many books and screenplays, including You’ve Got Mail with her sister, Nora); the — fingers crossed — standing ovations. But while chatting with him about his new play, a later-in-life romantic comedy in which he stars opposite Julianna Margulies, the 69-year-old actor was more focused on a contrasting emotion: fear.
“It’s really just the richness and the terror of the experience,” he said. “It’s terrifying and it’s hard, but it’s part of the appeal.”
When you’re in a Broadway show that’s working, he said, you feel that success in the moment — the actors are in sync, the audience is palpably rapturous. Gallagher knows this euphoric experience well from turns in both dramatic plays, like the 1986 revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night which earned him a Tony Award nomination, as well as lavish musicals, as in 1992’s Guys and Dolls, which won the Tony for Best Revival. In comparison, when you’re filming a movie or TV show, you never know if it’s going to be a hit; and even if it is, once it’s presented to viewers, actors are removed from the audience response.
But the key, according to Gallagher, is that there’s great artistic satisfaction to be had on Broadway even if the show is a flop.
“It’s nice to be on a winning team [in the theater]. But even if you’re not on a winning team, if you’re on a good team, that experience endures,” he said. He is adamant that he’s “had as many delightful experiences on shows” that were critical failures.
“I mean, I still have a show that’s on the wall at Joe Allen, the historic wall of flops,” he said. The New York restaurant famously hangs posters of Broadway failures, including the 1982 musical A Doll’s Life, which Gallagher starred in and closed after just 18 previews and five regular performances. “But it was with an extraordinary group of people.” It’s hard to imagine any movie star having such fond memories of a box office bomb.
It’s one of the few places as an actor where no one is editing your performance. You are out there in the driver’s seat.
– Peter Gallagher on the enduring appeal of live theater
Besides Ephron and Margulies, the industry heavyweights joining Gallagher in Left on Tenth include longtime producer Daryl Roth and director Susan Stroman, both recipients of multiple Tony Awards. The other Hollywood transfers are no doubt also enticed by the prospect of working on a smaller scale with creative luminaries. In McNeal, Downey Jr. has been paired up with one of the great directors of the modern era in Bartlett Sher, as well as Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar. Clooney will be directed by David Cromer, who won a Tony for The Band’s Visit, while Washington and Gyllenhaal will team up with Kenny Leon, who is also behind the starry Our Town with Jim Parsons and Katie Holmes.
Naturally, Gallagher mentions how the “great contraction” currently happening in Hollywood may be pushing big-screen and small-screen actors to the theater, as the streaming boom goes bust and movie studios are increasingly reliant on the outsized success of fewer titles, a la “Barbenheimer.” Additionally, the continued rise of platforms like TikTok and YouTube and the rollout of artificial intelligence have these established industries, and the people who work for them, spooked. As such, filming schedules for even the most in-demand names may be lighter than they were just a few years ago, offering these artists the leeway to tread the boards.
“Also, a bunch of us are at a time in our lives where, like, I’m not expecting to get discovered,” he said. “I’m not expecting [people to suddenly think], oh my God, I was so wrong about Gallagher.”
That’s the downside of being a household name with movies and TV shows that people watch over and over again: audiences begin to expect certain performances, and directors and producers put them in a particular bucket. But on the stage, these actors have the chance to reinvent themselves and reinvigorate their creative fire, not just because the team is more intimate, but because, in the end, they have full control.
“It’s one of the few places as an actor where no one is editing your performance,” Gallagher said. “You are out there in the driver’s seat.” Especially for actor-directors like Clooney and Branagh, who is co-directing as well as starring in King Lear, it’s easy to see the appeal of not only having full control of the final cut — but making those decisions live.
Why “Kimberly Akimbo,” the Best Original Broadway Musical in Years, Is Closing
The show has no stars, no pop songs and no lucrative source material. You’ll regret missing it.Yes, there are reasons specific to the 2020s that explain why these celebrities are taking a chance on the Great White Way. There is also the ultimate reason, the one Clooney mentioned in his one-sentence statement upon the announcement of Good Night, and Good Luck when he said Broadway is “the venue that every actor aspires to.” It’s a sentiment Gallagher has understood since at least the 1980s, when he was a 30-year-old starring alongside Jack Lemmon in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
“He didn’t have to,” Gallagher said of his co-star’s choice to return to the stage. “He had Oscars and everything you could possibly hope for, and he wanted to do that.”
Not only did Lemmon want to feel the joy and the terror of the theater again, but he was absolutely giddy before going out on stage knowing that only the 1,000 people assembled in the audience that night would ever have that singular experience. The play would never be done the same exact way ever again. As Gallagher remembers, “before every entrance, he would say, ‘Magic time!’”
Gallagher described the rehearsal process for Left on Tenth as “very intense and wonderful,” and this week he’ll once again get the chance to bring his own magic to audiences at the James Earl Jones Theatre. He expects the show will be a success, seeing as how they’re offering up a “New York love story” that he believes will speak to people in our divided times. But even if it’s not, even if it’s more A Doll’s Life than Guys and Dolls, he’ll walk away from the play feeling creatively fulfilled.
“It’s like Susan Stroman said on our first day: what is better in this world than the first day of rehearsal for a Broadway show?”
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