Tears, Hugs and Joy with Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Jonathan Groff and More of the 2024 Tony Award Nominees

The 2023-24 Broadway season has come to an end and the newly minted nominees for the 77th Tony Awards have begun their monthlong period of celebration and reflection. Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek sat down with dozens of this year’s recognized artists at Sofitel New York hardly 48 hours after receiving the exciting news.

“It’s the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened to me in my professional life,” said first-time nominee Sarah Paulson, an Emmy and Golden Globe Award winner who stars as Toni Lafayette in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ family drama Appropriate. A seasoned actress with plenty of bona fides for her screen career, she still says, “It’s like a puncture to my little seven-year-old heart.”

Jessica Lange, a 2016 Tony Award winner for her performance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, returns to the Tony fray—this time for her performance in the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s Mother Play, starring alongside fellow nominees Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger. “With Streetcar Named Desire, or Glass Menagerie”—in which she serendipitously co-starred with Sarah Paulson in 2005—“and certainly with Long Day’s Journey, you know the play is brilliant,” said Lange. “You know it works. But with this, it was like the great unknown, and that’s a huge leap off the cliff.”

Merrily We Roll Along star Jonathan Groff, meanwhile, joins the party with his third career nomination, following previous nominations for his roles in Spring Awakening and Hamilton. Even so, he’s consciously preserving his youthful ebullience as he enters his latest Tony season. “I remember being 22 at the Tonys and feeling like a dream that I had as a kid is coming true. And feeling like, ‘Why is everybody so serious?’” Groff recalled, working hard to talk through tears. “I remember telling myself then when I was 22, if I’m ever back here again… I’m going to try and not lose the joy.”

Watch the full video below, also featuring conversations with Mother Play’s Jim Parsons, Purlie Victorious’ Leslie Odom Jr., Cabaret’s Eddie Redmayne, Hell’s Kitchen's Maleah Joi Moon, The Outsiders’ Brody Grant and and Merrily We Roll Along’s Daniel Radcliffe.