Sydney Lemmon on Her Promotion From Broadway Understudy to the Biggest JOB of Her Career

Age: 33

Hometown: Glastonbury, Connecticut

Current Role: Sydney Lemmon stars in the Max Wolf Friedlich play JOB as Jane, an employee at a tech company who was put on a leave after experiencing a mental health crisis at work. She appears in the two-hander alongside Peter Friedman. Michael Herwitz directs.

Credits: Lemmon made her Broadway debut understudying the role of Rebecca in Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman. Her TV credits include Fear the Walking Dead, Succession, Helstrom, The Good Fight and Evil. She has also appeared in the films Velvet Buzzsaw, Firestarter and Tár.

It's in the Genes!
Lemmon spent the first few years of her life in Hollywood, California where her father, Chris Lemmon, was a working actor. Much of her extended family also lived there, including her grandfather—Oscar-winning acting legend Jack Lemmon, known for films like Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. “I was very close to my grandfather all growing up,” says Lemmon. “My mom and dad told me stories about when I was a kid, making him laugh hysterically—just doing little things that kids do. He would say, ‘It's in the genes! It's in the genes!’” Looking for a change of pace, the family moved east after Lemmon’s two younger brothers were born—closer to her mother, Gina Raymond's side of the family. “It changed from city life to a small rural Connecticut town.”

Brahms, Baltimore and Butterworth
“My dad's a classical pianist, so I was really lucky to grow up with beautiful music all the time,” Lemmon says. She remembers "hearing music at night or before dinner, filling the house,” naming Brahms, Ravel and Rachmaninoff as some of the first artists to hit her senses. Naturally, movie watching was a central family pastime. And then there were the cast albums: “I played the Hairspray album—I mean, I think that thing shattered in my boombox.” The list goes on: “Spring Awakening: CD shattered. Les Miz: CD shattered.” Living within driving distance of New York also put her in proximity of the real thing. “I have memories of coming to the city to see these plays that absolutely astonished me,” she says. Mark Rylance struck her like an "Olympian" in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. And Nina Arianda's Tony-winning performance in David Ives' Venus in Fur left a permanent imprint: "When I saw that play, I was like, ‘That's what acting can look like.’" 

School Days
For Lemmon, acting was less a pursuit of the family trade than it was, as she describes it, “following my pleasure." She enrolled in a magnet high school where she could split her time between traditional academics and arts education. “I was better at plays than I was at algebra and physics, and I just took a real liking to it.” She went on to get her BFA from Boston University in 2012, followed by an MFA from Yale in 2017. “It's truly been a love of education,” she says of her journey as an actor—one that's embraced technique and craft. A lesson from director Robert Woodruff her first year at Yale still informs her work: "Go either slower than you think is possible or faster than you think is possible. Nothing in between." The takeaway was not a polished performance but a sense of possibility. “There's no correct way to do it. Push yourself to take a different stab at something,” she recites like a mantra. “It’s a class that I've been thinking about almost daily doing JOB on Broadway.”

A Parisian Broadway Debut
Lemmon’s first job after undergrad was a nine-month stint in a non-equity national tour of Romeo and Juliet, doubling as Benvolio and Lady Capulet. “After that, I spent a year waitressing in Brooklyn and trying to get roles.” Graduate school gave her a break from the grind, and in 2017, new degree in hand, she landed her Broadway debut understudying Phillipa Soo in The Parisian Woman—a play by Beau Willimon starring (in addition to Soo) Uma Thurman, Blair Brown, Josh Lucas and Marton Csokas. “I was so lucky to understudy someone like Pippa,” says Lemmon looking back on her first Broadway experience. “She put me in a dress on opening night. She was just unbelievably kind and I was lucky to get to learn from somebody like that.” The play ran for four months at the Hudson Theatre and Lemmon spent that time soaking up all the wisdom she could. “I got to go on a couple times and feel the thrill of that. It was a really magical experience.”

"Maybe People Are Going to See This Play"
Lemmon was cast in JOB before Peter Friedman signed on as the Lloyd to her Jane. Quick to gush about her prolific costar, she calls him “the greatest gift to off-Broadway” and, with a nod to her childhood awash in cast albums, insists, “How could you not love him in Ragtime!?” She and Friedman had crossed paths in Scotland while shooting HBO's Succession—Friedman a series regular and Lemmon a guest star. But without any scenes together, all Lemmon could do was admire him from afar (“I remember walking by him in a hotel,” she says, summarizing the extent of their interface). When playwright Max Wolf Friedlich later called Lemmon to say that Friedman was the actor he had his eye on for JOB's 2023 Soho Playhouse premiere, she had two distinct thoughts: “Oh sh*t, I really have to step it up,” followed by, “So maybe people are going to see this play.’”

A Big Broadway Experiment
“The biggest shocker to us was bringing this play out in front of the first audience,” Lemmon says, remembering how she and Friedman were blindsided with laugh after laugh. “We were like, ‘what the hell is going on here?’” The pair had rehearsed the play straight—molding the tenuous back-and-forth between a woman undone by her career and the crisis therapist in charge of patching up her fragile psyche. The audience lapped up the dark humor in its fissures. "It's exciting to see that people have a bit more of a threshold for having their buttons pushed,” she says, having now played Jane at three different venues. "I think this has been a big experiment." JOB’s organic groundswell led to a second off-Broadway run at the Connelly Theater and now a Broadway engagement at the Hayes Theater scheduled to run through the end of September. “We didn't realize that there was an appetite for a play like this on Broadway—and it's absolutely astonishing to see that there is."