Yahoo News Brody Grant on His Tony-nominated Performance in ‘The Outsiders’
Brody Grant is having a breakout Tony season for the books. After initially missing out on a part in “The Outsiders,” only to have an audition come back around years later, Grant eventually landed the lead role of Ponyboy Curtis in the musical based on S. E. Hinton’s classic book and the Francis Ford Coppola film. It’s his Broadway debut, and it earned him a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actor. (The awards will be held June 16.)
Grant was born in Rapid City, Mich., which he describes as an “old, rundown place,” and lived there until he was nine years old, when his family moved to Georgia to be with his mother’s side of the family. It was there that he found the arts.
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“In the south, the high school theater community is so alive. There’s something in the water there,” he says. “It’s really, really crazy, the amount of talent that comes from Georgia.…So I got to experience that there from when I was nine, and really, as soon as I found theater, I’d say truly in high school is when I really hit the ground running — but I was all in, that was all I did. It was theater and choir, and I threw myself all the way into it.”
The casting director for “Dear Evan Hansen” took note of him when he tried out for a part he didn’t get, and eventually called him for “The Outsiders,” in 2019. He originally auditioned for a role that is no longer even in the show, which was set to go into production in 2020, and he assumed the whole thing was a dead end.
“It’s weird, crazy divine timing. It’s only thanks to that, that the show was able to stick around and then try again. And I was able to reaudition, and then I was cast as Soda Pop, and then things changed, things evolved and grew, and the show changed, and they asked me to audition for Pony, and now here we are.”
Grant knew of the story through his mom: “It was the book for her,” he says, “and she was in love with the movie cast. She had all the movie actors up on her locker.”
She gave him a copy of the book when he was a freshman in high school, and though he wasn’t much of a reader at the time he couldn’t put it down.
“I think it was the one book I actually read in high school.”
It’s especially moving to him now to see teenagers with their parents at the show, given the role it played between him and his own family.
“It’s just like it was for me — ‘The Outsiders,’ the entity, kind of bonded me and my mom. It’s just one of those things that we both loved,” he says. “I have multiple interactions like that, and then you have the nice people that just genuinely love it. I mean, it’s a gift to be in a show where people are coming back. Sometimes it’s their third, fourth, fifth show, and people find something new in it every time. So yeah, it’s been special.”
Given his schedule, Grant hasn’t been able to check out any other shows this spring, though he quickly rattles off the names of several he’s dying to see. Such is the blessing then of Tony nominations time: plenty of opportunity to mingle with one another.
“What I like about Broadway is it really is a community of artists, in a way that’s very unique,” Grant says. “Part of the reason I started doing theater from the jump in middle school is because, even if I had a hard time admitting it, I was like, ‘Wait, these are my people. This is where I belong.’”
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