Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson Make Their Broadway Debuts in The Fear of 13

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0:47This is The Run Through. I'm Marlee Marius, senior editor of Features and News, and I'm delighted to be back on the show with more theater coverage from this amazing season. I'm speaking to Adrian Brody and Tessa Thompson, who currently star in The Fear of 13. The Fear of 13 opened last week on April 15th at the James Earl Jones Theater. That show is based on a documentary of the same name about Nick Iarris. He was a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for 22 years and then was exonerated based on DNA evidence. And during that time, he was visited by a volunteer and fell in love with this woman.

1:27And they had this very interesting romance where they are never touching, but they are, you know, speaking through glass and they're writing each other letters and they're talking on the phone. And it's like quite romantic and it's beautifully portrayed on the stage by Adrian and Tessa. So we have a really interesting conversation about both of them returning to theater for the first time in a long time, both of them making their Broadway debuts. And what the process of putting that show together and hearing from the audience and doing the stage door has looked like for both of them. And also just how they are sort of regrouping and carrying on their lives outside of the show.

2:05They have very different approaches to this. Tessa seems to be having the time of her life. Adrian is making stew. So it's a fun conversation. and now Adrian and Tessa.

2:20Adrian Brody, thank you so much for being here. Tessa, thank you so much for being here. You're so welcome. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you. How have you felt since your big opening night? I mean, you're both making your Broadway debuts. What does that mean? What's that feeling this week? What is that feeling? This is something I've dreamt about for a really long time. it was really coming to New York and seeing theater as a kid, which I got to do a couple times, and then as a teenager, which I did all the time, because I would save my money and I'd go see shows around New York, on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-off-Broadway.

2:56And those were the moments that I really understood that I probably wanted to act, even before I even understood that that's what I was understanding. So it feels really incredible. And then every night we go out at the stage door and invariably there are people there that say it's the first time they've ever seen a Broadway show. Which is so cool. That's really cool. And then I think of myself the first time I ever saw a Broadway show and what that meant to me. And there's students that come and it's their first year of drama school or their last year of drama school. And there's just all these interactions with audience members.

3:32And yesterday we passed by a wall. it's a theater thing which I didn't know about if you're in a Broadway show you send a note where everyone signs happy opening to all of the plays that are opening so along our hallway when we enter is every single show almost every show on Broadway had sent us that's amazing and we did the same for all the shows so being a part of the community Adrian's laughing because he didn't sign anything because he didn't realize it was happening I've been just coming to work but I didn't realize I was like wow who are all these people signing she goes you're supposed to have been signing I said people must think I'm a jerk because I'm the only one that's signed but it's not because I didn't of course I would be happy to sign why would I sign someone else's script I didn't know what it was so I didn't understand it there's all these traditions and we're new we didn't know and then there's all the traditions I'm curious to hear from you what your pre-show ritual is because I don't even know there's all these things like every day when I enter there's a big picture of James Earl Jones.

4:36And every day I stop and have a moment with James. Oh, that's great. I love that. What do you do? What do I do? I acknowledge him in passing, but I'm in awe of being in that magnificent theater. And even the moment that I was afforded an opportunity to preview it, It was pretty awe-inspiring. It's beautiful, of course, but it used to be the court. And it's just to be in this ground zero of this haven of work that's been done for so many years. And a community that, like Tessa said, I too have had such admiration for, but it's always been a distant dream. I've had a lot of trepidation, if I'm going to be honest, just because of the enormity of the task.

5:40And I started doing Off-Broadway very young as a boy. And my mother is an amazing photographer. She photographed for decades for the Village Voice. And so I was very fortunate to be very closely interwoven with a very artistic New York community. And then also had like my street shit in Queens, which shaped me and shaped who I am and shaped why I even gravitate to this role in particular. And I'm so grateful for this coming my way. I'm so grateful for Tessa's involvement and what she brings to this and to have the privilege of working together. but watching her conjure up this character night after night.

6:28And back to your question about opening night, I mean, I'm personally relieved to be past it. Of course, it's a lot of pressure to have never done this and to live up to your own expectations. My own expectations are merely not blowing it, blowing it in a moment. Not that, you know, am I going to find the greatest connection and the best performance? What is kind of the presence of an audience bringing to this sort of experience for you? I mean, it's beautiful to have that. It's really beautiful. And, you know, last night we walked off the stage and I said to Tessa, I was like, that was a little anticlimactic.

7:12And it was merely— Which, by the way, apparently the night after opening is always supposed to be that way. Interesting. Because it's just like normal? Intuitively, I understand that. But still, there was some disappointment because of the heightened state of everyone going to a festive opening night of a new play on Broadway. And this was a lovely night. But the interaction felt slightly subdued. I was like, hmm, maybe we didn't bring it. We should wrap it up. But that's kind of amazing. In a play like ours, especially because the fourth wall doesn't always exist. So there's interaction with the audience.

7:59It is really and truly a dialogue with them. The conversation is different every night. Yeah. Nick Yaros has been, I know, very present in this process in London as well as here. Present is in certainly seeing the show a lot. And I'd kind of love to ask, first of all, when each of you first met him and just sort of what the dynamic is like with him at this point. Adrian's had a much longer relationship, of course. Yeah, when did you first meet him? Well, I met him prior to doing the play in London. Lindsay Farentino, our writer, spent a great deal of time with him. And, you know, Nick is very generous of spirit and a wonderful orator and storyteller and has lived many lives and has an understanding of life that is quite remarkable, an understanding of time and the preciousness of time.

8:58And he even says that, you know, he's hard to kill, you know, because he's just tenacious and he lives. And he still possesses this wonderful, I think, enhanced empathy. And to have him physically there is something quite profound. Sure. emotionally there is kind of a divining rod for me. There's a lot of playfulness and humor and gregarious stuff that is true to Nick, too. But it always helps ground me knowing my responsibility to him and to see him there. Yeah, he was with us when we were doing table work. So he came in and he would, you know, offer a couple things or tell a story on break, for example.

9:54But then sometimes we would just be reading the play and you could look in the corner where he sat and sometimes he was like silently weeping, which was, yeah, like I think really profound for the cast, especially those of us that were new to the experience. And also maybe, I don't know that everyone in our cast has made work that's based on someone that's alive or living, and that's its own thing, whether someone's in the room or not. They're always in the room when you do that, right? So then when they're literally in the room, it's a completely different thing, and so I think that was a quite profound experience for the cast.

10:38And then recently, Nick says this thing to me, and I think the reason he keeps repeating it is because I don't know how to respond to it in real time, so he maybe wonders if I heard him. But he keeps saying this thing to me, which is that he would do it all over again. He would spend the 22 years that he spent there again if it meant that he could watch what Adrian and I do every night. Oh, my God. Tell the story. No wonder you don't know what to say. I never know how to respond. Oh, my God. So I don't really properly. I would highly suggest against that. It's not necessary. We're here, so it's fine.

11:18Exactly. I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. I don't know what to do with this. But so he says things like that. I was going to ask if the show feels quite, I mean, you did it in London. There was a bit of a gap before it opening in New York. Is it feeling to you like quite a different show given, you know, you have new cast members, you have a new director, obviously it's a new space. Does the show feel quite different than it did in the first day? I mean, I think it was a two-year gap. Goodness, yeah. I was like, okay, I'm going to have to learn this again. But then definitely I have to learn it again because it is vastly different.

11:53Really? Vastly different. New director's vision, new cast, myriad script changes and alterations and moments that did exist or moved and shifted and paragraphs and sentences and things that are all new. And it's very interesting to play a man that you think you know, and he's not the same man that you played. Yeah. It's so different. And also you were different. And I'm different. I'm different. I don't know. I'm just older. I'm more tired. Maybe you're just older. Maybe that brings something. I'm always curious about this because obviously there's a different cast. But like, for example, David's last play, he did Bug.

12:31And that they remounted. It was the same exact cast, but they hadn't done it in a handful of years. Right, yeah. And I think they did it pre-pandemic. and their worldview will have changed because the world has changed and that becomes embedded in the work. It's like the way I feel about rereading, which I think a lot about because we read these series of books over the course of the play. One of them being, maybe I'll get in trouble here, but I love Lolita. It's like one of my favorite pieces of literature. It's just beautiful prose. But I have a different feeling about books when years pass and I read them again over the course of my life.

13:09If, you know, something strikes me different. So I imagine it's kind of the same with material in a way. Tessa, you obviously alluded to, like, your love of the theater for a long time and seeing shows when you were growing up. But it has been a while since you've done live theater in New York, certainly. A decade. Like a decade. Why so long? Where have you been? You know, I've been asking myself that question daily now because I'm like, why did it take me so long? I think, you know what? It's because time just flies, doesn't it? It's the beginning line of the play. Time can be a blisteringly fast thing.

13:43You look up and suddenly 10 years are gone from your— Is that the line? 10 years ago? Similar, yeah. Okay, yeah. These years are gone from your life, and I think it's a similar thing. I had not planned on it being 10 years. And I certainly—maybe this is just my hubris— I had intended to do my Broadway debut way before now. Sure, sure. It was like—it's been a circuitous route to get there in a way because Broadway was always the thing that I imagined once I decided I wanted to be an actor that I would do. Because I was like, I'll go to conservatory, maybe I'll get into Juilliardo, maybe I'll get into NYU.

14:14And then I started working in TV and film before I could apply to any of those programs. And because I lived in Los Angeles, so my trajectory just was sort of changed, frankly, by just circumstance and where I lived. And I don't know, but the hope, the sincere hope was always to do a new piece of work. much as I love revivals and there's so many plays that I'd love to do I love the idea of just wrestling with something that is growing and changing and the room for invention and also when you get to originate a part just what that means I think maybe because I grew up reading these plays and you'd look and see who originated the show on Broadway and that just always there was just a luster around that yeah this idea of like originated by this person just to be the first to try to unpack something and figure it out together.

15:09Oh, when Thompson was on the stage. Yeah, exactly. I'll never forget. That moment at the end. Exactly. Loss. Exactly. Harrowing experience. Exactly. Never to be replicated again by these young actors. Yes, that's exactly what you want to do. Or you want to take an old piece of work and you want to just like blow the lid off of it and like take it apart and put it back together in some new way. I'm already, I'm like, I think about what I want to do next. I love that. It's been a very long time for you since you're here. I'm just thinking about where I can go relax. Really? Are you thinking about that shit?

15:47I am. Good for you.

15:52The Run Thru will be back in just a moment with more from Adrian Brody and Tessa Thompson.

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16:38It's certainly no small thing to, like, lead a show like this. And what about maybe the story or the team that you would be working with, Adrian, made you go, I would like to take this on? I, when things instill a degree of trepidation, for lack of a better word, abject fear, maybe more like anything that moves me, makes me concerned about the potential failure and disaster. And I get very curious about it. I get very excited. You're a masochist. I think I am. I don't want to say that I am, but in a weird masochistic way, I find a lot of joy in handling the responsibility of portraying the things that are deeply wrong and the suffering that others have to experience.

17:43and finding a way of expressing that in a way that sheds light on that. I'm curious about the way that both of you prepared for these parts. I mean, I think, Adrian, you're sort of known for being quite intense in your preparation projects, certainly for your film roles. So I wonder, you know, of course, the play is adapted from a very moving documentary that's really just Nick speaking. But beyond that, and also you have not met Jackie, the real Jackie, right? But no, no. It had always been Nick's wishes to protect her life and her life, her new life that she built without him. And so that wasn't on the table for me.

18:25And Lindsay also did not have access to Jackie when she was writing the piece. The piece is an amalgamation. It's things that she's understood about Jackie from Nick. It's also things that she's written. She sort of has invented the shape of this woman. But the thing that I have been able to do, which has been really incredible, is to spend just time with people that do this work and understanding sort of what it means to them, how they do the work, how it sort of affects their lives. And then also, thankfully, there's kind of a lot out there as a resource for also people that have the spouses or family members or loved ones of folks that are incarcerated.

19:05Because sadly, there's so many people in this country that are incarcerated. And also every night I go to the stage door and invariably there is someone there. I met the daughter of a man and a woman that met when her father was incarcerated and they fell in love. No way. I meet spouses. I meet the children of folks that come and see our show. So that's been a lot of my prep is just sort of understanding through folks that really do this work and people that also have loved ones. She's also a gifted actor and can intuit a lot of the circumstances and find truths in that. And I think that's part of what the key is, is to, you know, interpret it in a way that it feels real to you.

19:55And so, of course, you have access to these things that are guides. Yeah. You understand enough about life to share that and to see it. And I think that's to your credit, I think. I'll take it. It's mostly – You can. It's my own. You have the intellect for it. You also have the emotional capacity. I love research. It's like my favorite thing. It's my way of circumventing whatever imposter syndrome that you can feel. But also it's just inquiry. I just love it. I love that process. I also think that Jackie, interestingly, is kind of the audience. She's kind of like the every person that brings you into this world.

20:37And there will be audience members that have experience with the carceral system, and there will be people that don't. And there will be audience members that really understand Jackie and understand how you could fall in love with someone even in those circumstances. And there will be audience members that don't understand it at all and judge her. And she also, by the way, judges herself at various moments. And so I think that's kind of the fascinating thing in a way. Yeah, what about for you? Obviously a very different situation with Nick being so around, but what did you – because I also know that there's – you know, you don't want to be impersonating this person necessarily.

21:10No, and I've always told Nick I'm not doing an impression of him, and he's super supportive of that. And I think, furthermore, Nick's story is representative of the inhumanity that's afflicted many, many people in our country. And we can have a whole conversation, many conversations about how flawed our judicial system is and the carceral system. And how easy it is to make a misstep in your youth, which isn't unfamiliar to me. Queens and Philly are not dissimilar, you know, and I grew up around a lot of opportunity to make mistakes and witnessing a lot of people make tragic mistakes in their life.

21:59There's a very small distance between having a life or having that taken from you. And I think that is, unfortunately, with all those momentary lapses of judgment or emotional outbursts or whatever, the downfall of many people's lives is one erroneous moment. So I understood my responsibility very early on in the storytelling and also why I gravitate towards that and how to tap into that.

22:36The Run-Thru will be back in just a moment with more from Adrian Brody and Tessa Thompson.

22:58Circling back to the books that are such a present part of this story and Nick says in the documentary and in the show how, you know, he kind of transferred his drug addiction into a real book addiction. Did you revisit many of the books that kind of come up in this show? Or if not, like, are you reading anything? Can you read, like, read, do kind of other creative things on the side when you're in a show like this? Yeah. I have been. I've started now because we don't rehearse. So we have our days free. So there's lots of time to read. It's been like three days. I don't know what this girl's talking about.

23:36Well, I only started. You've been reading a lot in the past three days? The tome on Baldwin that is extraordinary. I just started it, so I'm two chapters into that. Good for you. It's incredible. But no, reading is a thing that I like to do before the show now with a little bit of time. So I set up a little, like in my dressing room, Jackie has a little library of books. I was not a Charles Simic fan. I wasn't super familiar with his work, but it's a favorite poet of hers. She's a PhD student in poetry. So I've been trying to re-engage. I love poetry, but it's something that I, like, forget to read sometimes.

24:16You know, like, it's not a thing that I think I'll pick up a book of poetry. So I bought a bunch of Simic. Adrienne gave me a beautiful Simic book for opening. And then I'll start reading, like, Mary Oliver. I try to read at least a poem before we get on stage. That's really nice. So I've been reading a little bit. But now that I have our days free, yeah, I think I'll try to get into a groove with reading a bunch more. I did read a little—I mean, Lolita, I revisit every handful of years anyways. But I hadn't read Catcher in the Rye in a very, very long time. Have you reread it? Some of it, yeah.

24:54Yeah. I didn't get to old Geller yet. I thought about it. I know, I did too. I did think about it. You know what I've been reading? You know what I've been, you know, I've been, that's so funny that you say this because I was like, wow, I'm, I really am impressed by you. Because I'm just really trying to catch up on sleep. Which is a challenge because I, you know, I don't sleep. I'm an insomniac because I'm. I go to bed, that's why. I go to bed immediately when I get home. Good for you. Great, good. But you're, you don't stay up later. Yeah, but you're doing other things. You made beats the other night?

25:23I make, yeah, I make. Musical ones, not beat root. No, I don't make beats. He also does make lovely breakfasts. I make stews. I came home last night and I cooked sweet potato, beef, and brown rice stew. Oh, yeah. And ate at 12, 18 in the morning. What? Because I don't eat from the mid-afternoon on. Okay, yeah. I'm starving. So I'm starving. We're both pretty hungry at the end of the night. And within that time, I've been making music for much of my life, which I just kind of mostly do privately. So cool. My music often is deeply influenced by the work that I do. And I've made, I'm a product of the birth of hip hop in New York, and I am living within Nick's journey.

26:14And so a lot of the musical work and soundscapes and even stuff that I've written is deeply inspired from that and offers me a soundtrack like a fighter has going on to the ring. I have a soundtrack that kind of both amps up my adrenaline levels but centers me and I custom create that and curate that. Whether it's predominantly my stuff now but other things. In London, I was listening to a lot of trap music and working out with one of the fellow actors prior, doing a little jailhouse workout that we do in my little cinder block walled dressing room in the Dunmar. And, you know, incline pushups off the bench, off the chair and on the bench and whatever.