Jonathan Groff Didn’t Want to Spend 7 Years as a “Singing Teenager” on ‘Glee’

“How did you get to be here?” It’s the question Jonathan Groff asks himself eight times a week in the Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along. Before the musical’s most recent production, Merrily was infamous in certain circles as one of theater icon Stephen Sondheim’s rare missteps—a structurally complicated show whose original 1981 Broadway production closed after just 16 performances. Now, more than four decades later, Groff and his close-knit main costars, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, have made Merrily We Roll Along into a bona fide hit, with all three earning Tony nominations in the process.

“It’s been almost two years now with the same group of actors all working together on Merrily,” says Groff on Little Gold Men this week (listen below). “We’ve all just completely fallen in love with each other. There’s a deep bond with the company.”

In conversation with VF’s Richard Lawson, Groff talks Merrily as well as his childhood in rural Pennsylvania and his Tony-nominated performance as Melchior Gabor in Spring Awakening. Rather than joining Lea Michele, his Spring Awakening costar and bestie, on Ryan Murphy’s Glee, Groff opted to stay in the theater world. “I really felt like I didn’t want to sign on to be a singing teenager again for another seven years, which I had just done for two years in Spring Awakening,” he tells Lawson.

Of course, Groff would eventually make his way to Glee in a recurring role as heartthrob Jesse St. James, and go on to make a bigger splash as Patrick, the lovelorn protagonist in Looking, Andrew Haigh’s groundbreaking queer series. He’s taken on a diverse array of film and television roles in the years since, from top-billing David Fincher’s period crime drama, Mindhunter, to voicing Kristoff in Disney’s Frozen, to starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s horror film Knock at the Cabin. Still, Groff has always managed to return to his theater roots. In 2016, he earned a second Tony nod for originating the role of King George III in the Broadway production of a little show called Hamilton; now, he’s nominated for his third Tony for Merrily. Below, Groff opens up about his “childhood obsession” with Sondheim, moving to New York to be an actor, and choosing the art over money.

Vanity Fair: I saw you on one of the late-night shows, and you said that when the nominations were announced, you were very emotional about it. Is there anything about Merrily We Roll Along or this role that feels important in a particular way?

Jonathan Groff: Oh, God. I think it’s a laundry list of things. I don’t know if it’s one particular thing. It’s probably a combination of listening to the original cast of Company while I shoveled horse shit out of my dad’s horse stalls when I was a teenager; he’s a horse trainer. Growing up in Pennsylvania and being obsessed with Sondheim musicals and reading a Sondheim biography during this high school science fair—I’ve got this childhood obsession with his work.

On top of all that, it’s been almost two years now with the same group of actors all working together on Merrily. We’ve all just completely fallen in love with each other. So there’s a deep bond with the company.

And then this show was a flop 40-plus years ago. Honestly, I can never tire of talking about it, because it just feels like a miracle that this show has come back after decades away from its original Broadway premiere. Now here it is, and it’s got seven Tony nominations. At this point, monetarily, the show has become a hit, which is difficult historically for Sondheim shows in general—even the shows that have been, like, artistic and critical hits of his. That monetary hit, it’s why he’s writing about it so much so deep into his career in Merrily. That was always really important to him and meant something to him. In some ways, it was the thing that often eluded him. To be inside of this production of Merrily as a hit is just, like, so surreal and so cool and so emotional.

The line I always heard was that Sondheim wanted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s box office, and Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted Sondheim’s reviews. The two coming together is very rare.

[Laughs] Wow, that’s so funny.

There’s a great documentary about the original production—people who were involved in it reflecting on this beautiful dream that didn’t quite work out. All these years later, there have been other productions here and there, but nothing on the scale of your show. How heavy was the responsibility to get it right and honor, or change, the legacy of this beloved but also kind of fraught production history?