London's Million Dollar Man Ben Goddard on Channeling Jerry Lee Lewis

Ben Goddard accompanied himself on guitar and flute—among other instruments—as Joe Gillis in a pared-down West End revival of Sunset Boulevard and spent the better part of a year sleuthing his way through The Mousetrap, the longest-running show in theater history. The 37-year-old actor has now shifted gears yet again, and will spend 2011 rocking out at the Noel Coward Theatre in Million Dollar Quartet as Jerry Lee Lewis, the part that won Broadway's Levi Kreis a Tony in a show chronicling the historic 1956 jam session of Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. Broadway.com caught up with the affable Goddard during the first week of previews for the musical’s UK premiere, directed, as in New York, by Eric Schaeffer.

How are you surviving previews of Million Dollar Quartet?
I’m a little tired. [In addition to performances] we’ve been in every day rehearsing, which is always a bit of a killer. What’s been great is that Eric [the director] and the others know how to make this show work, but they’ve also let us discover it for ourselves. At no point have any of us felt as if we weren’t creating this for the first time, or as if we were simply filling other people’s shoes.

Did you see the Broadway production of the show?
No, I didn’t. I could have done, and I have quite a few friends in New York, but I actually felt it was really important for us to discover it for ourselves. The cast on Broadway is the same as it was in Chicago, and I didn’t want to see them doing something really well—a show they’ve been doing for a long time and would, of course, be brilliant at it. I wanted to come at it without any preconceptions whatsoever. [Robert Britton Lyons, who plays Carl Perkins, is the lone casting holdover from the U.S.]

Did you think of yourself as natural casting for the part, or does this feel like a stretch?
It’s funny, actually—when I got the role, I must have had upwards of 50 texts saying, “You were born to play this.” [Laughs.] People know that I like rock and roll and have been playing rock-and-roll piano since I was a kid, but it’s very rare when a role comes along and you think, “I have to be seen for this!” A friend of mine who saw it in April rang me from New York and said, “You even look a little bit like Levi [Kreis], the same kind of mannerisms.” I thought, “Crikey, that’s incredible!” So, it’s very exciting.

Your connection to the music must be enormously helpful.
And being a musician! You have to go into a show like this having some—well, quite a lot of— experience, and the fact is, all of us up there who are playing the four guys are really, really accomplished. You can’t play a role like Jerry Lee Lewis and learn the piano during the rehearsal process.

This seems more the sort of show one finds on the West End than on Broadway.
You mean like Great Balls of Fire, with Billy Geraghty? [That tribute show to Jerry Lee Lewis briefly played the Cambridge Theatre in 1999.] Yeah, but this has more a fly-on-the-wall feel. It’s in effect saying: This is what it would have been like in 1956 to have been at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, with these four people who were there jamming and just being themselves and enjoying one another’s musicality.

Playing Jerry Lee Lewis is quite a workout, I would imagine.
I’ve lost about half a stone [seven pounds] already, though my wife will probably tell you that I needed to [laughs]. It feels as if Jerry Lee Lewis was the original punk rocker, always breaking stuff and setting pianos alight: The show is one hour 36 minutes, and we really go for it; we really rock it out.

Not that playing an instrument in a show is new for you: You did that in the Sunset Boulevard revival with Kathryn Evans two years ago.
That was a great, great experience. Joe Gillis is a great role in any case and there I was playing piano, guitar, flute and drums and stretching myself in all areas. I thought it was really interesting, too, in our production to take away that great, massive house and reveal a story that is essentially about the lives of four people or even two, in which Norma imposes herself on Joe and his life.

How fascinating to have moved from Sunset to The Mousetrap, which is one of those shows that can swallow actors up.
That play does come with a certain stigma, but we were really lucky, I think, to have a good cast [including Sasha Waddell and Gary Tushaw] who took it seriously; we all had a really good year. That said, the joke from a lot of my friends was, “If you take The Mousetrap, you should really retire!” [Laughs.]

No chance of that, I hope. And anyway, Jerry Lee Lewis is such an audience-grabbing role!
He's such an asshole! He's the brash kid who gets up everyone's nose and goes against the grain, and that's always fun to play.