Sara Gettelfinger on Her Broadway Rise, Devastating Downfall and Clear-Eyed Comeback in Water for Elephants

In 2011, Water for Elephants star Sara Gettelfinger landed maybe the biggest break in a theater career filled with numerous highlights: a genuine leading lady turn as Morticia Addams in the first national tour of The Addams Family.

True, the role wasn’t on Broadway, but her entire career had been a hard-won climb to the top for the statuesque triple threat—starting as a stand-out dancer in the national tour of Fosse, becoming a trusted Broadway ensemble member and understudy, stepping out of the chorus to replace Jane Krakowski in the showy role of Carla in Nine, originating a featured role in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, even getting to do a new John Guare play at Lincoln Center with director George C. Wolfe. Of course a big musical leading lady turn was the natural next step.

But Gettelfinger was holding onto a secret. As she reveals on this week’s episode of The Broadway Show with Tamsen Fadal, she had developed a crippling addiction to cocaine that was taking control of her life: “When I say I crawled over the finish line of that tour, I am not exaggerating. I had to wave the white flag and go home to properly get into rehab and get treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.”

As she shares in the deeply personal interview, getting herself clean was only the start of a long, winding road back to Broadway. Once settled back in Louisville, Kentucky, Gettelfinger became a victim of impulse control, and developed a gambling addiction—well-documented side effects of a medication she was prescribed by her doctor who was helping her stay sober.

Prescribed the drug nonetheless, Gettelfinger was arrested for theft in 2015, but avoided a felony charge thanks to her otherwise clean record. Instead, she received three years probation and lived in a sober living house with regular drug testing.

Watch the full interview below to learn more about Gettelfinger's journey back to the stage.

“I’m completely fearful of ending up with actual jail time, so I’m certainly not going anywhere to gamble, I’m certainly staying clean,” she says. “But the crazy thing was, I’m still thinking about [gambling] every day… And that’s when I reached the point of, what if this is all that’s left for me? I don’t even want to be here.” Feeling lost and alone, Gettelfinger hit her lowest point and attempted suicide. But she soon received a miracle in the form of a law commercial seeking out victims of the medication she had been taking for years.

“My heart stopped and I called the number,” she remembers. A representative from the law office set her straight about the side effects of the drug. “The next day I get an appointment with my doctor to get off this thing and I’m not kidding you, it was approximately three weeks and it was like a spell was broken.”

Gettelfinger served her time in probation, while balancing “unconventional” jobs waiting tables at Frisch's Big Boy restaurant and selling vacuum cleaners, and found support in new friends far from the entertainment world: “What was so incredible with these different jobs, with these different chapters of my life, came people from very different backgrounds. They didn’t give a sh*t about Broadway, maybe had never even been to the theater. And were some of the wisest, strongest, most incredible people I’ve ever met in my life. And they saved my life.”

Then in the fall of 2017, a surprise came in the form of new love and family when Gettelfinger was asked out by a childhood friend, Eric Popp, an executive at an A/V company in Louisville. “Our first date was just for coffee,” she says. “And it ended up being eight hours.” They were married in their backyard of their Indiana home in late 2020; Gettelfinger became stepmom to Popp’s two middle school-age children.

A pandemic-time Zoom reunion of the original cast of Seussical, her first Broadway show, brought Gettelfinger back in front of show business friends. And a successful concert the following year at the New York City nightclub 54 Below, in which she performed the role of Mayzie LaBird, convinced both Gettelfinger and her new husband of one thing—she wasn’t done with performing yet.

Her first professional job back was playing the aptly named Star in The Cher Show at Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine in 2022, and last month, she returned to Broadway as a member of the company of the acclaimed new musical Water for Elephants. She plays Barbara, an aging showgirl in the Benzini Brothers circus family.

“She is definitely the mama bear,” Gettelfinger says of Barbara. “She is definitely a caretaker, but she is also the old, wise broad—nothing she hasn’t done, nothing she hasn’t seen, and she’s a survivor in her own right. There’s no way I could inhabit this if I hadn’t have lived and experienced everything that I have. There’s just so much of the layers I found in her that are completely a byproduct of these very difficult adventures that I’ve had.”

Gettelfinger has now been sober for 11 years, and actively lives in gratitude while enjoying her unexpected new Broadway adventure. “I have a very different definition of what a bad day looks like,” she shares. “So, it’s all good. It’s all a gift." She stops herself and chooses her words carefully: "I shouldn’t say that. It’s not always good. It’s hard. This business is heartbreaking. Nobody does this because it’s easy. Nothing truly beautiful or lasting gets made because it’s easy. But it’s so worth it.”

When she stands on the stage of the Imperial Theatre with her new Broadway family to take her bows, it hits her different now. “It’s still thrilling,” she shares. “But the reason that it’s thrilling is different. I actually view the curtain call as a 'thank you' to the audience because I love what I get to do every night and I feel gratitude to them. Because they’ve shown up, I get to step out there and tell this story and do what I love. I’m just very, very, very lucky.”