Ryan McCartan on the Beautiful Growing Pains of The Great Gatsby: 'I Chose the Thing That Terrified Me'
(Photo by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)
Ryan McCartan was all set to nestle into the 19-person ensemble of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends. The show, a Sondheim pastiche coming to the Friedman Theatre in the spring, would put him on stage with musical theater luminaries like Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. It would also be a relatively low-stakes way to inch back into the Broadway scene. When he was simultaneously offered the opportunity to follow Jeremy Jordan as the title star of The Great Gatsby on Broadway, it felt like a cosmic joke.
“That is the best and worst thing that can happen to an actor: to be given choices,” McCartan said to Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. “So often we just fight and fight and fight—and by the skin of our teeth, we get one thing. Then when you get two at the same time, there's a piece of it that's like, ‘This is miserable. This is cruel.’”
(Photo by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)
McCartan—a 2011 Jimmy Award winner and Disney Channel veteran—made his first splash on stage in 2014 as silver-voiced psychopath J.D. in the off-Broadway premiere of Heathers: The Musical. Two years later, he played Brad Majors in the Fox remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and two years after that, he made his Broadway debut with an eight-month run as Fiyero in Wicked. In February 2020, he came back to Broadway as Frozen’s dreamy villain Hans, a job that...you guessed it...lasted less than a month.
With his typical fare landing somewhere between angsty schoolboy and charismatic hunk, The Great Gatsby’s tortured antihero felt like an intimidating departure. “I started in this business when I was seven and I am 31 now,” he told Fadal. “I still think of myself as that kid that gets thrown a bone. And Gatsby is just so, I mean, for lack of a better word, Gatsby is so—adult.”
He contrasts himself, “a kid from Minnesota,” with the “sophisticated and complicated” man he was sure the show’s casting directors were looking for in their next Gatsby. Whether already method acting or willfully forgetting that Gatsby hides his own North Dakota roots beneath a Mid-Atlantic accent and piles of illicitly earned cash, McCartan decided it was time to start—adulting.
“I chose the thing that terrified me,” he said. “I know that that was a good choice. And I also feel like I'm going to throw up every day. I am so glad that I put myself here. And I can't believe that I put myself here. Because it's horrifying.”
As is so often the case, Sondheim’s lyrics come in handy here...
Growing up
Understanding that growing never ends
Like old dreams—
Some old dreams—
Like old friends
