London Calling: Jonathan Groff on Glee, Stage Thrillers & Crossing the Pond in Deathtrap

Americans are flooding the London stage this year, from Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act and Sierra Boggess in Love Never Dies to the cast of Hair and David Hyde Pierce in the Broadway-bound La Bete. To that list can now be added Jonathan Groff, 25, who’s co-starring with Simon Russell Beale in the West End revival of Ira Levin’s 1978 thriller Deathtrap. The Tony-nominated star of Spring Awakening (and recent addition to TV’s Glee) has forsaken singing for the challenge of going head to head with Russell Beale and Estelle Parsons, directed by Tony winner Matthew Warchus. Late in previews, Broadway.com met the friendly young actor in his dressing room, which is decorated with a string of fairy lights courtesy of Russell Beale. Also on display: an orchid sent by Pierce, who won the Tony for Curtains in 2007, the year Groff became one of the youngest performers ever to receive a Best Actor nomination.

How amazing to find you joining the ever-expanding list of Americans on the London stage—and in a play, not a musical.
This sort of surpasses anything I would have expected to do here. I love doing musicals and I love singing musicals, but the idea of doing a play in London is such a cool thing, and to be doing a thriller, too—it’s like my dream job.

The theatrical thriller is pretty much a vanished art, the success of long runs like The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black notwithstanding.
There was a feeling in the 1970s that if you could write a good thriller, you were set for life because of all the stock and amateur rights, which isn’t the case anymore because it’s a genre from another time. But [director] Matthew [Warchus] was talking to us about wanting to see if he could breathe some contemporary life into Deathtrap so that it becomes more than just a thriller; it’s a really interesting character study. Certainly, our hope is that people will laugh and be scared and all that but also feel as if they had a full evening of theater and not just that they saw a genre play.

But for all the twists and turns of the plot [not to be revealed here, but think loads of weaponry and a murderous playwright], how do you actually rehearse scaring people?
You don’t. You just play the scene for what it is. Matthew focused on the reality of the play and the situations—and, from that, that they would hopefully be scary and funny, too. Our job in the rehearsal room was to investigate the characters and the relationships and to investigate the play.

And how extraordinary to be sharing a West End stage with Simon Russell Beale, who before this had probably done every kind of theatrical assignment except a thriller.
I really admire Simon; he’s done it all, which is incredible.

Did you know him already?
I was over here in May to do some preliminary stuff and went to see him [at the National Theatre] in London Assurance. He took me up on the roof afterwards, and we had dinner there and he showed me London from that perspective. He said, “That’s St. Paul’s [Cathedral] where I sang in the choir when I was young,” and that sort of thing. And we’ve been to the theater together to see As You Like It.

In some ways, you must feel as if you’ve never left home, given the number of American performers on stages here.
I know! I had dinner with Michael Arden last week and am seeing him Sunday in Aspects of Love, and Patina [Miller, star of Sister Act] is one of my closest friends; we’ve spent every day off together. After our first preview, Simon and I went to The Ivy and she joined us and the three of us hung out. Long before Deathtrap, we would Skype once a month and I came to visit her last year, but we never dreamt when she moved over to do the show that I would be living and working here, as well. It’s made the transition a dream.

In contrast to Simon, who went to Cambridge and then to drama school, you have been learning your craft by doing.
Yes. I never went to college, so I never had any formal training; it's all been on the job. Estelle [Parsons] studied with Lee Strasberg and all that, but she said that at the end of the day, being in front of a live audience is the best teacher, and it's definitely true. With Spring Awakening, I walked in the door one kind of actor and walked out two years later another kind of actor.

People seem to be impressed at your continued commitment to theater, given the success you’ve just enjoyed on TV in Glee.
I’m just a theater nerd. I love the theater, and I’m lucky that I have agents who support that, and who thought [Deathtrap] would be amazing for me to do. In fact, I hadn’t done a play since The Bacchae in Central Park. That was over a year ago, and I really wanted to do one, so when this script came through and Simon and Matthew were already attached, I thought, “Well, if the part is even halfway good, I have to audition because they are so amazing.” I actually bought these boots [points to shoes on floor] for the audition because there’s a line in the play about, “Beware a man in boots!” I went to an army store in Manhattan near 33rd Street, and the boots were there in exactly my size, 10 1/2. And now they’re in the show! [Laughs.]

What about the nuts-and-bolts of the actor’s life here, compared to New York?
[Theater owner] Cameron Mackintosh wallpapers his dressing rooms, which is unusual [laughs]. I feel like the dressing rooms are nicer in London than New York. Simon’s one downstairs is bigger than my New York apartment! It feels like people here are more social, too, after the play, because there is often a theater bar and that culture of everyone having a pint. From my window here [points], I can talk to the cast of Avenue Q across the way [at Wyndham’s]. Right before you came, I was having a chat to them out the window and we're going to meet up for a drink next week.

What’s happened to you on Glee? Has Jesse St James gone to London?
That’s really funny— they do that on shows, don’t they? I was supposed to do only three episodes and then it got extended to seven or eight. I was written on as a senior, so the thought is that I graduated—but there is a possibility of me coming back. I’m here till January, but they are shooting the second season through April. But nothing official has been asked or offered.

What’s in store for Jesse if he does go back?
I don’t know; he’d wreak some sort of musical havoc, I’m sure [laughs].

I see that the British press has been feting you in Glee while also raising the issue of you having come out in the U.S. How does it feel to have to address that anew?
It doesn’t really irritate me. I knew they would probably bring it up because it was, like, a big blow-up for a while. It sort of is what it is, right?

In the meantime, I see that in a recent column about the Broadway prospects for Deathtrap, columnist Michael Riedel described you as a “cutie-patootie.”
[Laughs] Oh, god, thank you, Michael Riedel!