Darren Criss Might Land Another Maybe Happy Ending At The Tony Awards

SPOILER ALERT: The final paragraphs of the following interview contain details about the ending of Maybe Happy Ending

TV has been good to Darren Criss. He found fame on Glee and critical acclaim in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, to name just a small sampling of his television work. But talk to the Tony-nominated star of Maybe Happy Ending even briefly about his career and one thing quickly becomes clear: He really, really loves Broadway.

Criss made his Broadway debut as Daniel Radcliffe’s replacement in the 2012 revival of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, returned as Neil Patrick Harris’ replacement in 2015’s Hedwig And The Angry Inch and in 2022 starred with Sam Rockwell and Laurence Fishburne in American Buffalo.

But it’s his glowingly reviewed starring role in Maybe Happy Ending that has earned Criss his first Tony nomination. Actually his first two – as a producer of the Will Aronson-Hue Park musical, Criss would take a trophy if the show takes the Best Musical award. In all, Maybe Happy Ending is nominated for 10 Tonys, including Criss’ Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role/Musical. And for the second time since 2022 Criss will cohost (with Renée Elise Goldsberry) the official Tony Awards pre-show The Tony Awards: Act One. (He also recently extended his run in Maybe Happy Ending through August 31).

In this interview, Criss talks about, among other things, Broadway, the Tonys and his Tony-nominated role of Oliver, a “Helper-Bot” in a future Seoul who lives alone in a small apartment, forever hoping for the return of his owner who, unbeknownst to Oliver has assigned the obsolete robot to a retirement compound where he’ll eventually run out of replacement parts. Across the hall, though, is Claire, a more recent (but still obsolete) “Helper Bot” played by Helen J Shen. The two form a bond despite learning of their impending power-down. The sweet and funny musical asks us to ponder: Is love worth the risk of certain heartbreak?

The Tony Awards: Act One will stream live for free on June 8 from 6:40 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. ET (3:40 p.m. – 5 p.m. PT) on Pluto TV. The 78th Annual Tony Awards, hosted by Cynthia Erivo from Radio City Music Hall, will immediately follow, broadcast live to both coasts on CBS and streaming on Paramount+ in the U.S.

Maybe Happy Ending is playing at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre. Directed by Michael Arden, the musical stars Darren Criss, Helen J Shen, Dez Duron and Marcus Choi.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

DEADLINE: So you could actually win two Tony’s this year, right?

DARREN CRISS: I suppose the answer is yes. I’m always being so, so coy.

DEADLINE: And you’re hosting the pre-show [with Renée Elise Goldsberry].

CRISS: I tend to only like doing it when I’m also in a show. So I did it while I was doing American Buffalo [in 2022] and so here we are again. I just love stacking things on. I sort of I thrive on overcommitting.

And I love the Tony Awards ceremony. I say that specifically because I try not to put too much stock into the sort of organized accolade system of it all, which is not to trivialize its importance and its distinction. But what I love about this ceremony specifically is that it is the biggest mainstream gathering for the Broadway community, historically the biggest platform for the shows. Now things have changed in the past several years, where Broadway, because of social media and quite to an exciting and wonderful degree, in my opinion, has been able to live outside of the theaters of midtown. It used to just be cast albums and the Tonys broadcast that were our access points. This was the way that most people around the US and maybe outside the US, this is how we would get an inside look. The Tonys still have this sort of classic grandeur to them.

Everybody who you are seeing perform at the Tonys most likely did a matinee that day. So when you’re watching a Tony broadcast, when you’re watching YouTube of a famous Tony performance like Patti LuPone performing as Evita, I love to remind people that by the time that she was doing that live on television, she’d had also just done it like three hours before…This is why the Tonys are so remarkable to me. The workhorse dynamic of these people is so important to me.

One of the only live shows that’s meant to be a live show that features a bunch of people that do live shows. So anyway, just being a part of it means a lot to me, because I love these people dearly. And, you know, people always talk on and on and on, like myself, about the community of Broadway. It’s not some disingenuous canned line, it’s a real thing, like we’re all roommates. We all work within several blocks of each other. We’ve all seen each other’s work. We’re all familiar on a very intimate level that by the time we’re all in Radio City, most of the people in that room have worked together, have hung out together, have shared experiences in a way that when you’re working in film and television, just by the nature of the way those those pieces are created, don’t. So, yeah, if you can’t tell, I love the Tonys.

DEADLINE: Since so many of you do all know each other, and let’s say you’re all friends, there must still be a feeling of competition. You, for example, are going up against your friend Jonathan Groff, so what’s that feel like?

CRISS: Call me a happy idiot, and naive, deluded, delusional, I genuinely feel zero percent of competition and that I can feel your readers eyes roll from my seat here at home in New York City. But it’s just true, like these are all people that I have spent time with, and hope to continue to gladly spend my time and money on getting to receive their work and their art and their inspiration. These are guys that I’ve hung out in bars with, had laughs with, been in theaters with done projects with. I really, really, really like those guys. I love their work. I think it’s all terrific. I think everybody has their own superpowers. Everybody has their own unique thing. And any one of these guys can do stuff I can’t do, and that can be said of everybody in that [best acting] category. Not because any of us are better or worse, we’re just different people, and we’re in wildly different shows. And I have to say, and again, I know that I have a generally happy go lucky disposition, but I mean this with as much genuine objectivity as I could possibly convey: There’s something very special about this Broadway season. There’s something really special going on this season, with very distinct shows that have something very wonderful and distinct to offer. If there was a guy that was exactly like me in another robot show, then, yeah, it would feel like the dirty C word of competition.

DEADLINE: Since you mentioned robots, how were your robot movements on stage developed? You have very specific movements, as opposed to Helen’s movements?

CRISS: I was talking about how we all have our own, maybe superpowers is a strong word, but we all have our bag of tricks. You know, we all have our parlor tricks as actors. And any time there’s a moment in a piece where one of those tricks might be handy for the piece, you certainly want to use them. But I never thought I’d be able to employ any of my interest in physical theater in this piece, it just truly didn’t cross my mind.

This show came about in the most miraculous way in my life…There’s something, dare I say, divine, about the way this thing kind of landed in my in my lap, via a friend who has been a longtime buddy, and somebody who I’ve admired forever, Michael Arden. We’re old pals, and I always wanted to work with him. And so when this came up, I guess maybe he knew about my interest in physical theater work.

Michael suggested that I zoom with Moni Yakim, who was a revered professor, now retired I think, at Juilliard for many, many years. I had two zooms with him, about an hour each, just to kind of talk about the physical vocabulary of what this role could be. And then as he was going through stuff, it immediately made me think, oh my god, we’re doing clown and Jacques Lecoq and commedia and mime and Marcel Marceau, the stuff that I loved a lot n high school, that I studied in college. I have to give credit to my professor Malcolm Tulip at University of Michigan, who was a Lecoq student. So I kind of got, you know, hip to that shit when I was in college, and then I took time off. I ended up studying abroad in the Italian countryside at a wonderful institution called the Accademia dell’Arte where we studied a lot of these very archaic forms of storytelling and physical storytelling that I fell in love with.

So I’ve got these tricks in my bag that just kind of sat dormant because I never thought I’d be able to use them. And my conversations with Moni kind of opened that attic doorway to go like, Oh my God, look at this dusty old box. Yes, I still have this. This is great. So I started employing a lot of those things that I was interested in, and saw how they kind of fit.

And to your point, about how I’m being a little different from Helen. My guiding light was to really contrast myself, not only as differently from her, but to contrast myself as much from an audience as possible, to kind of let them know what’s going on immediately. Here’s our characters, here’s the world we live in, here’s the tone, here’s the heart, here’s what we can laugh at and what we can take seriously. From the very opening of the show, I kind of employ all those sort of goal posts within my physicality. And from the jump, you understand this thing is not human, but there are human tendencies. And so I really wanted to use the physicality. So it’s a bit of Commedia dell’arte, it’s a bit of Kabuki, it’s a bit of geisha, a lot of their physical vocabulary, and with a significant dash of the great Glen Keane, who’s one of Disney’s finest animators, and to me, one of the great animators of facial expressions. There’s a lot of Disney animated film in the way that Oliver emotes with the space.

DEADLINE: Helen Shen isn’t quite as robotic, which makes sense because her Helper Bot character Claire is a slightly newer model than yours.

CRISS: Helen has said and very astutely that Oliver exists with a lot of angular edges where Claire has more curves and fluidity. And I think that’s absolutely true. And the more I angle, the more she curves, and the more she curves, the more I angle, it’s symbiotic, this noticeable polarity between the two characters.

DEADLINE: Which brings me to my my last question. Does Claire erase her memory? Because everyone I discuss this with seems to have different ideas.

CRISS: Well, I think far be it for me to take anybody’s particular perspective away from them, but I have a definitive directive from Michael Arden of what happens and I’m happy to tell you what it is, because I think it’s neater storytelling, it’s more tidy. I think Oliver definitely does keep his memory and Clair deletes hers. That’s the play that we’re telling, that’s the story we’re telling. That’s the action that she’s playing and it’s the action I’m playing every night. But the theater is a living, breathing, mutating organism. What I love about people’s uncertainty is that it speaks to how invested they are in the story and these characters. I love that people have their own ideas. I think we’re telling a very specific story but I’m a big believer that when you make stuff and you put art into the world, it doesn’t really belong to you anymore.

When I was a kid, the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which is such a formative film for me that I will love forever, they literally ride off into the sunset. And I remember just like wanting them to ride forever, like not even time or life itself will stop these people, these heroes, from going on adventures forever. But then the sun goes down and the movie ends, but my takeaway was like, Well, surely they’re gonna keep going forever, even though logic tells me they won’t. But that hope that they do, and that excitement of it, despite everything I know, is such a fun feeling to hold on to.