James Scully Is Not Cut Out for Nannying, But Was Destined to Be Oh, Mary!'s Teacher

Age: 32

Hometown: San Antonio, Texas

Current Role: James Scully plays Mary’s Teacher in Cole Escola’s bawdy comedy Oh, Mary! about Mary Todd Lincoln and the days leading up to her husband’s assassination. Directed by Sam Pinkleton, the show runs through November 10 at the Lyceum Theatre.

Credits: Scully played JD in the 2018 TV series Heathers, Forty Quinn on season two of Netflix’s You and Charlie in the Hulu film Fire Island (written by Joel Kim Booster). He originated the role of Mary’s Teacher off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre before moving with the show to Broadway.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare
Scully spent the first five years of his life in Farmborough, England where his father, a U.S. Airman, was stationed. “For a long time, I did have a pretty delicious British accent," he says. "We moved back to Texas and it was thoroughly beaten out of me by my classmates.” Still, his family kept some things posh. “My mother—and I say this lovingly—is a little pretentious.” He contextualizes, “I think she believed in the merit of arts in the home.” The youngest of three, Scully was raised on a diet of essential musicals: Andrew Lloyd Webber favorites like Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom of the Opera. Plus, classics like White Christmas and The Sound of Music (“My sister made sure that I consumed as much Julie Andrews as possible.”) Scully also got started early on Shakespeare. “We must have watched Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing dozens of times.” Meanwhile, his brother was a skilled violinist—something Scully also attempted to demoralizing results: “Listening to someone who’s not good at the violin try to play the violin is a punishing experience." A pivot to the cello proved “slightly more forgiving on my family’s ears,” but he says, “It took me a little while to realize I should be doing what I'm excited about and what I'm good at.” Musical theater was it. He applied to a high school arts program in San Antonio and decided, “OK, I think this is going to be the great work of my life.”

"I Have Such Doubts"
“I need an impossible amount of encouraging,” Scully says. Still a “gregarious child” at his core, his insecurities don’t surface as stage fright, but rather, as gnawing doubts ("As Meryl Streep said, 'I have such' ...") He remembers waking up in the middle of the night his freshman year in Otterbein University’s BFA program, panicked with the thought, “What are you going to do if no one wants to pay you to sing or dance or act?” His teachers were infinitely reassuring. “‘You are enough’ was a big thing they said to us at school,” he remembers. “That's something I would like to scream into the face of every young person I meet. You should be exactly who you are and expect to find a space for that, because there is one. And if there isn't one,” he amends, “pull a Cole Escola and just make one for yourself.”

Out of the Mouths of Babes
After college, Scully dabbled in nannying, but confesses, “I just couldn’t hack it. Small children are kind of terrifying to me—And they’re so honest,” he says. “You’re like, ‘Well, I wasn’t ready to hear that today, but thank you for the clarity.’” He left behind the angst of childcare for a front-desk job at a cycling studio, which led him down the path to becoming a group fitness instructor. “I can't recommend that enough as good, solid day job,” Scully advises his fellow actors. “That's how I basically supported myself until the acting jobs started to manifest.” In addition to the decent pay and flexible hours, it was a kind of performance with instant emotional feedback. “I do this because I hope to touch people and make them happy,” he says of his chosen career. As a fitness instructor, he was able to have the same impact in a 45-minute session. “Sometimes I wish I could go back to teaching on the weekends. It was really rewarding.”

"If You Were Happy Every Day of Your Life, You Wouldn't Be a Human Being. You'd Be a Game Show Host."
“There was a really happy period when I did a series of Outback Steakhouse commercials,” Scully says with utter sincerity, though he laughs at the concept of residuals: “They send me a letter every couple of years being like, ‘no money for you.’” Still, he remembers buzzing with the feeling of being “on the precipice” of a big break. And he was right. “I had never had an on-camera job before, besides those commercials, and suddenly I was the lead in a television series.” Scully was cast in Heathers, a 2018 TV adaptation of the 1989 black comedy about murder in the world of high school cliques. He starred as JD, the dreamy but violent misanthrope originally played by Christian Slater. “I cannot say that that story ends particularly happy,” he notes, cutting to the final act of what, at the time, was a drawn-out saga of delays, stutter steps, and ultimately, a cancellation after just one season. “Even though there was a lot of disappointment and confusion and pain, I look back and I'm really happy that happened,” he says. “Even actors that we think of as impenetrable have stories of being knocked back and humbled.” His philosophy now is, “If I'm doing my job and I'm showing up with a good attitude and I'm being kind to the people around me, everything else is out of my control.”

Happiness Is ...
“It's not that I had given up on it or forgotten about it,” Scully says about his stage aspirations. “But I had gotten really deep into film and television.” In 2019, he landed the role of Forty Quinn, a main character on season two of the Netflix thriller You; and in 2022, he starred in the queer, Pride and Prejudice-inspired romcom, Fire Island (he played the Charles Bingley counterpart Charlie, with his Oh, Mary! castmate Conrad Ricamora as the Mr. Darcy-adjacent Will). Those jobs also happened to sandwich a pandemic that shook the theater industry. “Theater became so untenable,” says Scully. “I really wasn't thinking about it and was more just grieving for my friends who were working in the theater. And then—what’s that old saying?” he muses: “Happiness is like a butterfly. When you stop paying attention to it, it comes up and lands on your shoulder.”

Something About Mary
“A year ago I didn't know what Oh, Mary! was, and now it's a cornerstone of my life.” Scully, who knew Escola peripherally through his partner, writer and comedian Julio Torres, was invited to do a reading of Oh, Mary! At the end, he was off-handedly asked to move with the show to the Lortel: “Everybody's going to get paid 15 dollars and a sandwich. I'm sure you wouldn't be into it,” is his memory of the pitch. “I’d do it for free,” was his response. At the time, “I was sort of terrified of [Escola],” Scully says of the show’s comedic mastermind—though, true to his doubting nature, he acknowledges the fear was more of “being laid bare” in front of an artist whose superpower is purging tedium. Escola is the first to slap a low-brow descriptor onto Oh, Mary!, but Scully characterizes their work as “pointing their finger at the world and saying, ‘you have boring and sad and tiresome expectations, and I reject them.’” Now, in his Broadway debut, Scully gets to watch 900 people cheer nightly for that brazen impertinence. “I just feel like that's cosmic justice in a world where so little makes sense and so little is fair,” he reflects. “That makes sense, and that's good. That's something we can feel happy about.”