Jonathan Groff: 'We have a very different attitude to ambition'

Exactly half his lifetime ago, Jonathan Groff first played J Pierrepont Finch, the lead character in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, in a high-school production of the show. He was just 15 at the time, playing a man who goes from mailroom clerk to chairman of the board of the World Wide Wicket Company.

The musical premiered in 1961, nearly a quarter of century before Groff himself was born, and long, long before the worldwide web was born, so the name of the company is uncommonly prescient.

He is now about to play the role again, headlining a one-off concert version at London’s Royal Festival Hall in a cast that will also feature Clarke Peters, Cynthia Erivo, Clive Rowe and Hannah Waddingham, but in the 15 years since he first played it Groff has himself shown exactly how to succeed in showbusiness, without any formal training, but by really trying.

It brings the warmly engaging, youthful yet strikingly level-headed and mature actor full circle to where it all began for him, and as we sit outside a cafe in New York’s Union Square on a warm May afternoon, he immediately produces his mobile phone to show me a photograph of himself in the role in that school production. “It was my first freshman year at high school,” he tells me, “and I know every word by heart. I love that show.”

So when the opportunity presented itself to reprise the role in London, he jumped at the chance to return to a city where he made his West End debut in the thriller Deathtrap in 2010, starring opposite Simon Russell Beale. “I’m really interested to see how it will play with a British audience. It’s about ambition and is so quintessentially American — and the way we process ambition in the States is so different from the way that ambition is articulated in the UK.”

Groff, of course, was not only ambitious by the time he arrived in New York, aged 19, but also smart. “I’d done theatre at high school, and also shows at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania [where he was born and brought up], which is semi-professional and has actors from New York working there. I was in the ensemble of all the shows while I was there and learnt a lot from them about living in New York. I subscribed to Backstage [the US equivalent to The Stage] as a senior, and when I moved to New York my roommate was a girl I’d met at that theatre who was living in New York.”

He graduated from high school in 2003, and had already deferred his admission to Carnegie Mellon University after auditioning and getting a job in a non-Equity touring production of The Sound of Music (he played Rolf). “I toured for a year, but I didn’t earn enough money to pay for a fourth of a year of the college I was going to go to. So I decided to take the money I had and move to New York, and see if I even liked living there, before I spent four years and a lot of money preparing to move there. I thought I could always go back to college if I didn’t like it.”

His first year in New York inevitably involved waiting tables. “I moved to New York on October 21, 2004, and it was the day that the Chelsea Grill, a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen on 9th Avenue between 46th and 47th Street, opened. I had never waited a table in my life, but I walked in and lied to the manager in a very J Pierrepont Finch way. I told them that I had waited tables in Pennsylvania at these restaurants they had never heard of, and they gave me a job. The head waitress took me aside later that day, and said, ‘you’ve never waited a table in your life, have you?’ And she took me under her wing and trained me.”

He worked there for about a year, all the while busily auditioning at every opportunity. “I’d moved to New York to pursue a career in theatre, and it’s very practical how you do it – I just went to every open call going. You sign yourself up on a list, and eventually you get seen by an assistant casting director. As you get seen enough they get to know you and then they start calling you in. The first job I got was a production of Fame – the Musical, at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts, and it got me my Equity card, too. I waited 12 hours to be seen for it, though!”

Then came the big break – but it didn’t look like one straight away. In 2005, he auditioned for Spring Awakening, a new musical based on the Frank Wedekind play by pop composer Duncan Sheik, for an Off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theatre in Chelsea. “I can’t believe that was nearly 10 years ago now. We opened Off-Broadway in 2006, but we barely made it through each step. When we were Off-Broadway, they would tell us, ‘Be really good as there are people with cheque books in the audience tonight – so don’t fuck it up!’ Then we moved to Broadway, but we couldn’t sell half the house. They would jokingly say, ‘Places everyone – and just so you know, we have 100 more people in the audience tonight than we had Off-Broadway!’, which meant that we had 400 people there in a 1,300-seat theatre. Then The New York Times gave us a good review, so we made it. By March, it looked like we might close, but we managed to squeak by to the Tonys, which then gave us a huge bump.”

Groff was nominated for best actor in a musical, and the show won seven other Tonys, including best musical. “Famous people started coming, and it became this thing, but it was a real effortful journey”.

Groff remembers Tony night particularly keenly at Radio City Music Hall, at which the cast performed a number from the show: “I can still physically remember being on that stage when we did it, seeing the layers of Radio City and the cameras going by and thinking I must never forget it. But I remember, too, seeing lot of famous Broadway actors and they were all so anxious. I brought my mom, and I remember thinking I never want to take this as seriously as they are. It was so much fun, and they were not having a good time.”

In the years since, Groff has kept having a good time – as well as stints in two Off-Broadway plays by Craig Lucas and starring appearances in the Public Theatre’s annual Central Park season in Hair and The Bacchae, he also starred in the TV series Glee. He recently also finished another two series of the HBO gay drama Looking. He played a straight character, Jesse St James, in Glee and a gay man in Looking, and was criticised by a writer for the influential US magazine Newsweek as being unconvincing in the former as he’s actually gay himself.

“I couldn’t come to my own defence, because I’m the actor concerned. But after Looking, I can now point to Raul Castillo, who played my boyfriend in the show and is straight. He was so effective and beautiful and fearless with me, including the intimate stuff, which was so believable. The character of Richie is so much the spirit of Raul as a person, and if he had not been allowed to play it because he’s straight, it would have been to the detriment of the entire story.”

Groff is active in the gay community, recently receiving a Point Foundation honour for his work as a role model to young gay people. “In my speech, I told them how all through Spring Awakening I was in the closet – I was doing this show about the importance of self-expression and the danger of sexual repression, and I was completely closeted, not telling cast mates or bringing my boyfriend to the theatre. He came to the Tonys, but was way at the back. How cruel and immature and sad that is, looking back. A month after the show ended, I came out of the closet and it totally changed my life. I always felt anxious and worried about it until I came out, but now I don’t care any more.”

Now he’s back in the theatre, having just completed an Off-Broadway run in the new hit of the year, Hamilton, that moves to Broadway in July. He has taken over from Brian d’Arcy James as King George in this story of one of the founding fathers of America, who had to leave to do Something Rotten. “I missed doing theatre and I love the Public, so I was very happy to step in. I saw it five times in a row before I did so, and I couldn’t see it without crying – it’s an amazing experience just to watch it.” Now he’s living it.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is on at the Southbank Centre, London, on May 19