Molly Bernard's Broadway Debut in Cult of Love Is a Gift From Her Grandfather

Age: 36

Hometown: Las Vegas, Nevada

Current Role: Molly Bernard is making her Broadway debut as Rachel in Leslye Headland's family dramedy Cult of Love, directed by Trip Cullman. The play's ensemble cast also features Zachary Quinto, Shailene Woodley, David Rasche, Mare Winningham, Roberta Colindrez, Barbie Ferreira, Rebecca Henderson, Christopher Lowell and Christopher Sears.

Credits: Bernard played Lauren Heller on seven seasons of the TV Land comedy series Younger and Elsa Curry on seasons four and five of the NBC series Chicago Med. Her off-Broadway stage credits include Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. at Soho Rep and House Plant at Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop. She made her screen debut as a child with a small role in the 2000 film Pay It Forward.  

Let's Go to the Movies
Molly Bernard is minimal with the details of her upbringing. She shares that she’s never met her father and is estranged from her biological mother, whose presence throughout her early life was also scattershot. What she is happy to be effusive about is her grandfather, stage and film actor Joseph Bernard, who passed away in 2006. “He was executive director of the Strasberg Institute with Lee [Strasberg] and he kind of retired to Las Vegas and taught acting.” Also, she says, “He saved my life.” Molly learned to read going to her grandfather’s acting classes and he kicked off her film education at six years old with a viewing of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (Joseph Bernard appeared in the film as Major Abe Radnitz, assistant to American prosecutor Tad Lawson). They also watched more common staples like Annie, It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz, a VHS she remembers wearing out a few times. “Once I was old enough to go to the movies with him, we would just go to the movies all the time,” Molly remembers. “I saw Mulholland Drive with my grandfather in the movie theater.” She laughs. “Psychotic. But we were just little movie buffs, and he was like, ‘You need to know about David Lynch.’”

We the People...
Molly can tell you exactly when she decided acting was for her. “We had to memorize the Preamble to the United States Constitution,” she begins. It was a First-Grade school assignment and her grandfather helped her prepare. She delivered her graded recitation, and later that day, Joseph coaxed an encore performance out of her. “He had an acting class that night and he had me get up on this little stage in front of all of his adult students and do the Preamble.” As the words flowed out of her tiny frame, she could hear her grandfather goading her with shouts of, “We want to hear you in the back!” and “Now make us believe in the Constitution!” “The people loved it,” she says with the winking sarcasm that’s become her comedic signature. “From that moment, I was like, OK. This is it. He gave me the gift that became my life.”

Children Will Listen
“When I was nine, I asked my grandpa, ‘Where's the best place to study acting?’” Molly recreates his response—deep, scrupulous voice and all: “Well,” he said, “there's two great places: There's the Yale School of Drama. You should go to Yale one day. And then there's the Moscow Art Theatre School. That's where Chekhov wrote all his plays.” As a young adult with a perpetually tumultuous home life, and now without her grandfather, who passed away before she left for college, she clung to the advice like a life raft. “It just gave me a very functional, clear goal,” she recalls. Molly started with an undergraduate degree from Skidmore College. “I knew I wanted to go to the Yale School of Drama for acting, but I wanted to be a smart actor,” she says. “I wanted to understand the world.” She majored in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies and minored in Neuroscience, but spent a semester her Junior year at the Moscow Art Theatre School. Her Senior year, she applied to Yale and was immediately accepted. “There's an element of, be careful what you tell your kids to do because they just might do it,” she says, thinking how she stuck to the letter of her grandfather’s instructions. “I followed my dream so hard. But also,” she allows, “I had a unique set of circumstances going on. The goals were also survival.”

XOXO
“I was fully convinced that I was going to be a downtown theater darling,” says Molly. Instead, she graduated from Yale and went straight into seven seasons of the Darren Star TV Land series Younger, led by Hilary Duff and her longtime comedy idol, Sutton Foster. “I watched every video of her I could possibly find,” Molly says, recalling the days when cast albums and pre-YouTube internet videos had to suffice. “I wrote her fan mail when I was 14, and she sent me an autographed picture back that said, ‘Follow your dreams, Molly. XOXO’” (the topic is now a running joke but still makes Foster turn red). When the audition for Younger came up, Molly told her agent she loved Foster too much to go in for it. Younger, following the trail blazed by Star’s culture-defining Sex and the City, didn’t shy away from raunch. Molly’s character, a pansexual publicist named Lauren who, at the time, was just a six-line guest star, was particularly unfiltered. “The scene that I auditioned with was talking about her bush,” she remembers horrified. “I was like, ‘I can't possibly do this.’” Her agent finally convinced her to go ahead with the audition. “And who knows?” he said. “What if Darren falls in love with you and you end up as a series regular?”

Though She Be But Little, She Is Fierce
Younger premiered in 2015 and Molly spent the next few years toggling between TV (including a recurring role on Chicago Med) and her downtown theater roots. In the middle of Younger’s second season, she performed in a Soho Rep production of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., a series of experimental vignettes by Alice Birch—and in February 2020, she opened Sarah Einspanier’s House Plant, another thrillingly unhinged work of magical realism at New York Theatre Workshop’s 65-seat space on East 4th Street. “Whenever I could make it work, I was there,” she says.

In January 2024, she landed in the Berkeley Rep production of Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love. She played Rachel—a Jewish-to-Christian convert who married into the Dahl family and learned that guzzling wine is the only way to survive their overwrought Christmas traditions. She was told if the play went to Broadway, she most likely wouldn’t go with it. “I was like, ‘That's no problem. I'll do it in Berkeley and enjoy my time with this delicious play out there.’” Then she fell in love with it. “I felt like a giant up there,” she says, forever conscious of her diminutive five-foot-two stature. “I typically play character roles, and this is not a character role. This is just a straight-up, legit woman who’s kind of suffering. It let me access all of these parts of myself as a person.” When the play got its holiday slot at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, Molly wrote Second Stage a letter asking to move with it to New York. “I just can’t believe it happened.”

Cult of Love
“It's funny making my Broadway debut,” says Molly. “I worked so hard to get here. I trained in theater and I'm very precious about it, but it's a lot of mental gymnastics to be like, ‘No, I'm good enough to go be in this cast of all-stars and do this play every night and just beast it.’” It smacks of the 22-year-old grad student who, she says, “wanted to be the absolute best I could possibly be because I was at Yale.” Molly acutely remembers “the stress of that—trying to do it right every second” amid the institution’s social cache. These days, however, there’s little time for second-guessing or overthinking, managing an eight-show week while also being a wife (she married Hannah Lieberman in 2021) and mother to a toddler (she hasn’t shared her daughter’s name publicly, but does say she’s named for her grandfather). “I can't believe I get to be with these legends every night,” she says, listing off just a few of her illustrious costars: “Mare, David, Shay, Zach, Roberta, Rebecca... It really feels like nourishment.” And as expected, her Younger family showed up in support. “Hil came to opening night,” she says, detailing Duff’s whirlwind 24-hour trip to the city to see her friend (and her daughter Banks’ godmother) make her Broadway debut. And then there’s Foster, who was just down 44th Street at the Hudson Theatre doing Once Upon a Mattress when Cult of Love moved in. During tech rehearsals, she sent Bernard a text asking, “Are you here!? Are you on Broadway!?” When Bernard responded in the affirmative, Foster replied, “Follow your dreams, Molly. XOXO.”