Tony First-Timers: Appropriate Star Corey Stoll on the Luck of Falling for Theater at an Early Age

Growing up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, Corey Stoll was seeing theater while he was still, by his own admission, “too young to see theater.” “My dad was a junior high school English teacher,” Stoll told Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show, “and he would take me with his classes to really off-Broadway stuff.”

Stoll, a first-time Tony nominee this year for his performance in Broadway’s Appropriate, fondly recalls seeing a production of Hamlet at the “barely refurbished” Public Theater—exposed pipes and crumbling drywall everywhere—in which the ghost of Claudius was conjured with a flashlight pointed at the wall. “It was really exciting to see real ‘poor theater,’” Stoll said, citing Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of actor-centric theater. “Theater where they had no budget and they were just sort of making it happen.” Stoll’s grandmother would take him to Broadway shows too. The 1987 premiere of Fences, starring James Earl Jones, stands out in his memory. “I feel so lucky to have, from an early age, seen that whole spectrum of theater.”

Happily, for Stoll and for New York theater audiences, he has been able to maintain a busy acting career on both the stage and screen. Soon after completing the graduate acting program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, he performed alongside Viola Davis in the 2004 off-Broadway production of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, which transferred to Los Angeles, kickstarting Stoll’s film career. Starring with Scarlett Johansson in A View From the Bridge on Broadway in 2010 led to the role of Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, “which really was the before and after in terms of my career,” he said. “So theater has been really good to me. It’s a place where I think I do my best work and where I can showcase myself the best.”

Reading Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play Appropriate the first time, Stoll was hugely impressed. “I had never seen or read any other Branden Jacobs-Jenkins plays before. So I was totally unfamiliar with him. And I read it and just immediately it was this new, incredibly strong, incredibly smart, biting—yet full of love and empathy—this new voice.”

Actually, Stoll was also a little confused at first: The script had come with a note for him, evidently a clerical mistake: “Read for interest for the part of Rhys.” (Rhys is the teenage son in the play.)

“I just knew if the opportunity were to arise,” Stoll continued, “I needed to work, if not on this play, at least on some play [of Jacobs-Jenkins’].”

In recent years, apart from starring in the Showtime drama Billions, Stoll has had a string of classical roles on stage: Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Iago, Macbeth. “Which has really, really been an education for me and really a gift,” said Stoll. “But to be able to do a contemporary play, and to be part of a living playwright’s work is really exciting. And I hope to continue to do that.”

The cast of Appropriate has been, in Stoll’s words, “a victim of our own success”: The production was originally slated to run through February 11 at the Hayes Theater. It extended at the Hayes, transferred to the larger Belasco Theatre and has since been extended two more times.

Stoll doesn’t mind the extra time commitment. “It doesn’t happen that often where everything sort of comes together. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the combination of script and director and cast and design team and theater… When it all comes together, that’s really special. You want to nurture that and you want to continue.”

At this point in the marathon engagement, though, acting in a play eight times a week feels “like any other job." But the whirlwind Tonys experience has been an opportunity to stop and reflect. “At times like this, you can step back and realize how special it is.”

As a first-time Tony nominee, Stoll is finding himself mingling with a lot of nominees from the musical-theater side of Broadway. “I’m not from the musical side at all. I would love to be able to do that, but I just don’t have those skills at all. So I’m really unfamiliar with, really, half of the nominees.” Even so, there’s an understanding and respect there. “With very few exceptions, you don’t wind up with the Tony nomination if you haven’t really dedicated an enormous amount of time and credible effort to it. It’s an award. It’s subjective. There’s a million worthy people who don’t get that nomination. But it’s one of those awards where the people who do get nominations, it’s coming from an enormous amount of sacrifice and hard work, and that’s a really beautiful thing to be a part of.”

GET TO KNOW THE TONY FIRST-TIMERS
Left to Right: COREY STOLL (Appropriate) | LESLIE RODRIGUEZ KRITZER (Spamalot) | JOSHUA BOONE (The Outsiders) | BETSY AIDEM (Prayer for the French Republic)

Watch the full episode of The Broadway Show with Tamsen Fadal highlighting all four of these first-time Tony nominees, and flip through the complete gallery of photos from our exclusive Broadway.com photo shoot.

The Broadway Show Credits: Directed by Zack R. Smith | Producers: Paul Wontorek and Beth Stevens | Senior Producers: Caitlin Moynihan and Lindsey Sullivan | Videographers: Shaun Copeland, Nick Shakra, and Ryan Windess
Photo Credits: Photography by Emilio Madrid | Photo Assistants: Alan Padilla and Cooper Hammel | Location: Corner Studio
Styling Credits: Styling: Jake Sokoloff | Hair and Make-up: Angella Valentine and Tameeka Lee Walker | Wardrobe: Todd Snyder blazer, Tie Bar tie, Eton shirt, Calvin Klein pants, Stacy Adams shoes