Interview with Brian d'Arcy James
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Brian d'Arcy James
Michigan-born Broadway actor and singer known for Shrek the Musical, Something Rotten!, Next to Normal and King George in Hamilton, and on screen for Spotlight.
Source: Playbill on YouTube
These answers are taken from Brian d'Arcy James in Playbill's My Life in the Theatre on Playbill's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What do you enjoy most about singing?
It's rare that you get to sing your sensibility of the music that you love most on a Broadway stage. Blood Brothers had that to some extent in a pop element, but [Next to Normal] is undeniably a rock pop score. I loved every single moment of the music of it, but also what this show asks of you emotionally and where it asks you to go.
There are moments where you're on stage and you hope to have those experiences where everything is being pulled out of you and hopefully demonstrated in a way that is interesting and compelling and dramatic. Those experiences where you feel like you're being asked to do something and it's scary, and you know the material is going to take you there without a doubt. Those are the experiences I think that you yearn for and you hope for.
What was a great moment for you as a singer?
The people around me in that show, comedy geniuses. Christian Borle as Shakespeare. Incredible. Brooks Ashmanskas. Anytime you're on stage with that man, I just look at him and I can't stop laughing. Brad Oscar, he's just one of the best.
And we had the great privilege of doing this great musical number where, I'll never forget it, during the first preview, and I know this happens but it never happened to me, people stood up after the song and they wouldn't stop cheering. It was so beautifully written by Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick and John O'Farrell, and Casey Nicholaw directed this thing, and it worked, and it was so thrilling because it was such a joy. It was a joyful romp of an experience.
How did your career as a singer unfold?
Blood Brothers was my first Broadway show. My dear friend Sam Samuelson alerted me to the fact that there was an opening in the show when they were in Toronto. This is a show I knew because of my sister Anne. Anne had spent some time in London and she saw the show in the '80s, and she said, "Brian, you got to see the show. You could do it." I knew the score because I had it on a cassette tape that I played in my Honda Civic. So I sent my resume and all that stuff to Pat McCorkle, who was the casting director who gave me my first Broadway show.
I was the understudy for Mickey. When Con and Mark left, David Cassidy and Shaun Cassidy came into the show to play the two leads. Shaun was there to begin that changeover, but David was delayed. So there was a week or two where I was actually playing the part of Mickey with Shaun Cassidy, much to the delight of myself and family and friends, much to the chagrin of a lot of people who wanted to see David Cassidy. Usually understudies have a one-stop shop and they get to either fail or succeed in that little moment. But I had a good couple of weeks.
What has been your greatest accomplishment as a singer?
I had done the role 20 years earlier, famously cursing Sondheim: what does this even mean, this show? I don't understand it. And of course, 20 years later, I'm a father. I've lost my own father. And this show plugs into so many things. To have been asked to join this group of people who are making this change from the Encores production onto the Broadway stage, I felt like I won the lottery, because I wasn't supposed to be there.
It was one of those moments where people really wanted to celebrate Sondheim. That confluence of appreciation and execution and the spirit and the deft way it was directed and presented all came together in this beautiful production. I have a Grammy Award because of this experience. Never in my life would I have expected that to be in the cards. Into the Woods was just one big, huge gift that I got to open up.
Think about a demanding director, producer or music director. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
I'm thinking of something that Dan Sullivan said to me in a direction that I'll never ever forget. Took me a while to understand it. We're doing a scene where my character Jamie is getting very upset about something, and Dan is just an expert at boiling it down. And he said, "Don't hide behind your Irish. Don't hide behind your Irish." What does that mean? He's like, "Just don't hide behind your Irish."
And I think I understand what he was saying now. There's a kind of sardonic humor that comes out to mask pain and to mask upset, and I think I was reverting to that as opposed to just living in the actual thing. Talk about an expert director jarring you out of your usual routine, making you think about something to hopefully make you better. Dan Sullivan is the best.
Has your career as a singer progressed the way you expected?
Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that when I did Blood Brothers, I distinctly remember waiting to go on for the first time. I was a replacement in that show, so I had to jump into it as it was already running. And I remember thinking, oh my god, what is this going to be like? I'm going to be in a Broadway show. And the second I walked on stage, I realized, oh, I know how to do this. This is the same thing that I've done in my high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, the same thing I've done in a Neil Simon play I did in college, the same thing I've done on a summer stock stage. It's all the same requirement, just a different building. You put your costume on, you remember your lines, you go to the place where the director told you to stand. I can do this. It's what I've been doing since eighth grade.
On the other hand, there's no way of forecasting the appreciation you'd have for the people that have come into your life, that have shaped you, changed you and made you a more alive person. How will this life change you? Well, it's the people. It's the unexpected beauty of it all.
Of all the roles, songs and shows you have done, which is your favorite?
This to me represents a culmination of things that I want to be in the theater, which is challenged. I want to be asked to do things that I don't know if I can do. And I'm lucky that Adam Guettel and Michael Greif and Craig Lucas said, yeah, we think you can do this. I've never experienced something where I had more reverence for the thing itself and wanting to get the character right. Depicting someone in the throes of addiction, in this case alcoholism, was a very serious endeavor, and then to do it in a way that required singing and acting.
And to do it with Kelli O'Hara, hand in hand, like jumping out of an airplane, is really a treasured experience because of the trust. If I had to close this book and say, that's my life in the theater, I'd be so satisfied with [Days of Wine and Roses] being the last thing I talked about, because I feel like that is a flag in the mountaintop saying, yeah, I was here.
Describe your style.
If there's a theme that has occurred through the roles that I have gotten to play, I sense that either the people that are looking to fill these roles or the things that I'm gravitating to are characters in crisis. Every character is in crisis in a play, otherwise there's no drama. But let's put it this way: normal people pushed to extreme places. Whereas maybe someone who's already in that world or on that avenue, I'm not. I'm kind of a normal Joe who is pushed into a place, and I think that might be a common thing. It's not for me to say.
Tell me about a song or a role that was hard to get right. What was it and why was it challenging?
The one thing that was hard was the makeup. It took an hour and a half to get in and it took 45 minutes to get out, and on two-show days I couldn't get out of the big head. Sometimes I would order food, because I couldn't take the head off in between the matinee and the evening performance. I'd have my little robe on, with my human body, my non-Shrek body, and a Shrek head, and I'd go pick up my delivery from the stage door looking like Hugh Hefner on acid or something.
It became clear in Seattle in our tryout that this makeup thing was going to be really brutal and hard. So a lot of the cast gave me CD compilations of their favorite music that I could listen to while I was getting into makeup. And Jack Scott, dresser extraordinaire, was basically Shrek with me. He would see me crushed by the exhaustion of it: I don't know if I can continue doing this. It was really challenging on a physical level, and Jack was always there to start the day and be positive.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
I suppose my colonoscopy story is probably warranted here. I had just done the workshop of [Hamilton] and I had my first colonoscopy, and apparently after I was coming out of my propofol haze, all the nurses were coming up to me and saying, "We can't wait to see the show. Thanks for telling us about the show." What are you talking about? "Well, you got us all tickets to this show." I have no memory of this, but apparently I was saying, you gotta come see this show, you gotta come see Alexander Hamilton. He raps, and it's about government. Apparently I promised the whole nursing staff at St. Luke's that they could come see the show at the Public Theater. I guess that speaks to the subconscious level of my appreciation for this show.
I joke that I'm the Pete Best of the Hamilton story. I told this joke to a drummer and he didn't laugh. He said, "No, that's not true, because you didn't get fired."
Brian d'Arcy James's Full Biography
Brian d'Arcy James was born on 29 June 1968 in Saginaw, Michigan, USA. He is an actor and producer, known for Spotlight (2015), The Copenhagen Test (2025) and West Side Story (2021).