As Doubt’s Last-Minute Star, Amy Ryan Signed on for a Ride of ‘Sheer Terror’—Because Why Wouldn’t She?

On February 2, the day of Doubt’s first Broadway preview, the show’s headlining star Tyne Daly was hospitalized and suddenly withdrew from the production. Two days later, Amy Ryan got a phone call. Nine days after that, Ryan was on the marquee of the Todd Haimes Theatre and leading the revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

“I do remember saying, ‘I’ll call you back,’” Ryan tells Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show, recounting the unexpected Sunday-night phone call that launched a thousand anxieties. She had been planning to buy a ticket to Doubt, having received the same enticing Roundabout mailer as every other New York City theatergoer—Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber’s stoic faces promising another riveting showdown between the confidently moralizing Sister Aloysius and the charismatic Father Flynn, whose kind demeanor may belie his indiscretions. But leading the play herself was not on her 2024 bingo card.

Ready to leave for a family trip to Colorado, Ryan floated the potential change of plans. “I spoke to my family and they were so calm,” she recalls, looking back on the minimal time she had to weigh the pros and cons of taking on a role that famously won Cherry Jones a Tony Award in 2005 and earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination in 2009. Without concern for the botched vacation, she was met with a frank: “Why wouldn’t you do it?” Without a good answer, she said yes.

It’s a classic show-must-go-on story—one that, in typical Broadway fashion, makes a super-human feat look effortless. While audiences were getting seamless performances, Ryan was waking up at 5:30am to learn lines and prioritizing dialogue according to director Scott Ellis’ blocking. “Whenever I was at the desk, I had scripts,” she shares, referring to the place Sister Aloysius often perches to deliver her caustic speeches—in this production, to Schreiber and Zoe Kazan, who plays the perpetually uneasy Sister James. Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who appears in one tour-de-force scene as Mrs. Muller, gives Ryan a merciful break. “When I was walking around the script, I knew those lines first,” the actress says, now laughing at the mayhem of those first few days. “It was so out of order.”

With Broadway credits dating back to Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig in 1993, Ryan has been a regular Broadway presence for three decades with two Tony nominations under her belt—one for her performance as Stella Kowalski in the 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and the other for her performance as Sonya in a 2000 Michael Mayer-helmed production of Uncle Vanya (her run in Doubt ironically overlaps with her beloved The Office co-star Steve Carell’s debut turn in Broadway’s latest Uncle Vanya).

It’s a resume that justifies a Hail Mary Sunday-night phone call, and a breadth of experience that can ground an actor through an otherwise unmoored leap of faith. And now, she can finally say that her feet are solidly beneath her. “It was really by hook or by crook,” says Ryan, her most treacherous moments of Doubt in the past. But the second it all clicked, “joy took the place of sheer terror—and I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun.'”