Hamilton Star Trey Curtis Traces His Path From Middle School Charlie Brown to Broadway's Foremost Founding Father

Age: 29

Hometown: Houston, Texas

Current Role: Trey Curtis plays Alexander Hamilton in the Broadway cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. 

Credits: Curtis made his professional acting debut in the Facebook Watch series Five Points. He performed in the third national tour of Hamilton, which traveled to Puerto Rico and featured the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, in the title role. Before landing that role himself on Broadway, Curtis understudied a number of the principal roles at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, including John Laurens/Philip Hamilton, Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson and Hercules Mulligan/James Madison. Curtis records and releases his own music as TREY.

Happiness Is...
Raised an only child, Curtis regularly found himself with free time on his hands. “I would just play with my toys and make my own musicals, my own concerts, my own lore,” he says. His mother, who worked at Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars, naturally assumed the stage was the place for him. And yet, “It didn't translate smoothly for me—doing the real-life thing,” he recalls. “It was hard for me to make friends growing up in theater, because no one really looked like me. And as a young boy growing up, that was really important to me.” It wasn’t until he arrived at Pershing Middle School in the care of theater teacher Debbie Broadhead and surrounded by other like-minded peers that it finally clicked for him. “She put me in my first leading role, which was Charlie Brown,” Curtis remembers fondly, noting how today you’ll even find a Charlie Brown tattoo on his wrist. “From then on, I just knew I loved to be on stage. It became really, really fun to me. Just like how my toys were.”

Mother Knows Best
For college, Curtis joined the nascent acting BFA program at the University of Texas at Austin. The last semester of his senior year, the program brought his class to Los Angeles for a nine-week acting intensive, followed by a showcase for managers, casting directors and the like. There, he found his beloved manager, Diego Arrambide, which prompted a post-graduation move to Los Angeles in the fall of 2017. “My mother drove me to Los Angeles from Houston,” he says. “Which is like a 22-hour drive where 12 hours of the drive is getting out of Texas.” The day they arrived, Curtis landed an audition for a Facebook Watch series called Five Points—the first scripted drama series slated for the new platform. “It was my first big audition,” he says. And fortunately for him, he had his first-ever acting teacher in tow. “I was feeling really nervous. I just got to L.A., I didn't really know anything about the industry except for what we did in school,” he remembers. “It was kind of a full-circle moment. The same mom who threw me into musical theater—now she gets to help me again. So, I went to that audition. And I actually booked it.”

I Used to Dream About This Moment, Now I'm In It
“After I finished filming Five Points, I didn't have a job really besides Vans,” says Curtis reminiscing about his brief but treasured career as a shoe salesman. “I loved working at Vans,” he gushes. “That was a dream job for me up there. I love shoes—and Vans. That's all I used to wear in middle school, in high school and college. I was almost as excited to get that job as I was Five Points.” Then in spring of 2018, Curtis got a call about an audition for Hamilton. “I needed to be in this show,” he says. Ever since his days of middle-school theater playing roles like Kenickie in Grease and Curly in Oklahoma!, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights had been his north star. “I will never forget watching the Tonys—watching Lin-Manuel Miranda do his freestyle acceptance speech for the show.” It made him think to himself, “There is so much room for me out there on Broadway.”

The Room Where It Happens
After an initial L.A. audition for Hamilton, Curtis was asked to fly to New York City for what he assumed was the final callback. One of his Vans paychecks would cover the flight east, and a friend of his, J. Quinton Johnson, who happened to be playing Hercules Mulligan/James Madison on Broadway at the time, could put him up. Immediately after that audition, in which he charmed music director Alex Lacamoire with an adorable version of Philip Hamilton’s “Blow Us All Away,” Curtis was asked back to New York for another audition in two weeks. The was just one problem: “I used my last check to get here this time around." Diego reassured him he'd be able to get back to New York. “‘They definitely want to see you again,’” Curtis remembers him saying. The production ended up flying him to New York, putting him up at a hotel, and getting him a ticket to the show. “It already felt like the dream had come true.”

Meet Your Heroes
When Curtis landed back in Los Angeles, he was offered a swing/standby role in Hamilton’s And Peggy tour: “I just set my phone down, and I walked out of the room because I knew I heard him incorrectly.” Not only was it a job in his dream musical, but it would be the production to go to Puerto Rico where Miranda himself would reprise the role of Alexander Hamilton. “It's kind of making me speechless,” says Curtis, reliving that moment, “because I just think back on the Tony speech and the fact that I knew I could do that. And now I get to do that with the person that made me feel that way.”

A. Ham
Curtis joined the tour in 2019 and entered the Broadway company in January 2023 as an understudy for most of the principal roles. He was back in rehearsal for the international tour, emerging from the Times Square subway station on his way to work, when again, he got some news from Diego: “‘Hey, so you won't be able to finish the international tour,’” Curtis heard him say on the other end of the phone. “‘In January, you're going to have to come back to New York to take over for the role of Hamilton full time.’” Curtis now only remembers the sound of the phone clinking against his earring as his whole body vibrated. “Diego, bless him, he let me feel that while I was on the phone and just kind of stayed silent with me.” After finally hanging up, he continued on his way. “It was beautiful, because I still got to be in rehearsal in the show that I love so much,” Curtis says. “Everything just felt like it needed to happen in the way that it happened.”