You Can’t Take It With You Star Will Brill on His Bad Boy Past & Why He Can Never Be a Magician
by Lindsay Champion • Oct 16, 2014
Age: 28
Hometown: Menlo Park, CA
Current Role: A hilarious Broadway turn as Ed, the rubber-faced, xylophone-playing husband of aspiring ballerina Essie in You Can’t Take It With You.
Stage & Screen Cred: Before making his Broadway debut in Act One, Brill appeared in off-Broadway’s Tribes and Our Town, both directed by David Cromer. His film and TV credits include Girls Against Boys, Not Fade Away and a stint on Louie.
“I was arrested when I was 15 for making fake IDs. A friend of mine started it as a business and passed it on to me—we had sold 200 IDs to kids throughout our school system when my house was raided by 11 police officers. They were really upset about it, as were my parents.”
“When I was a kid I wanted to be a magician, but then I saw David Copperfield live. I had an existential crisis about how I would never be as good as David Copperfield, so I gave up and decided to focus my efforts on my backup plan: Being an actor.”
“Six months into the run of Tribes, David Cromer told me that he only let me audition because it would be easier than telling me there was no way I was going to get the part. He brought me in as a courtesy audition and somehow I changed his mind.”
“At the beginning, I struggled with this show because so much of my energy was focused on learning the xylophone. But I had a bunch of lessons with [percussionist] Benny Koonyevsky. I think he would say too many lessons, but it was really helpful for me.”
“I didn’t think James Earl Jones would be as funny and charming and egoless as he is. Throughout rehearsals he would remind us that he was always open to line readings, which of course, nobody did—how do you give James Earl Jones a line reading?!”
“Filming Louie, the biggest interaction I had with Louis C.K. was when I first walked in the door. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, Will Brill, you f*cking guy, come stand here.’ That was it! It was pretty cool he knew my name when I walked in.”
Hometown: Menlo Park, CA
Current Role: A hilarious Broadway turn as Ed, the rubber-faced, xylophone-playing husband of aspiring ballerina Essie in You Can’t Take It With You.
Stage & Screen Cred: Before making his Broadway debut in Act One, Brill appeared in off-Broadway’s Tribes and Our Town, both directed by David Cromer. His film and TV credits include Girls Against Boys, Not Fade Away and a stint on Louie.
“I was arrested when I was 15 for making fake IDs. A friend of mine started it as a business and passed it on to me—we had sold 200 IDs to kids throughout our school system when my house was raided by 11 police officers. They were really upset about it, as were my parents.”
“When I was a kid I wanted to be a magician, but then I saw David Copperfield live. I had an existential crisis about how I would never be as good as David Copperfield, so I gave up and decided to focus my efforts on my backup plan: Being an actor.”
“Six months into the run of Tribes, David Cromer told me that he only let me audition because it would be easier than telling me there was no way I was going to get the part. He brought me in as a courtesy audition and somehow I changed his mind.”
“At the beginning, I struggled with this show because so much of my energy was focused on learning the xylophone. But I had a bunch of lessons with [percussionist] Benny Koonyevsky. I think he would say too many lessons, but it was really helpful for me.”
“I didn’t think James Earl Jones would be as funny and charming and egoless as he is. Throughout rehearsals he would remind us that he was always open to line readings, which of course, nobody did—how do you give James Earl Jones a line reading?!”
“Filming Louie, the biggest interaction I had with Louis C.K. was when I first walked in the door. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, Will Brill, you f*cking guy, come stand here.’ That was it! It was pretty cool he knew my name when I walked in.”
