Moulin Rouge! Star Tam Mutu on Singing Rihanna Every Night and Getting Hissed at by Audiences

Tam Mutu almost didn’t audition for Moulin Rouge! The Musical. The actor is making audiences love and hate him nightly in the hot-ticket musical, based on the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film. Mutu originally thought his character, the villainous and alluring Duke, would be more like his onscreen counterpart, who was more, in Mutu’s words, “buffoon-y.” 

Mutu, whose other stage credits include Doctor Zhivago on Broadway and Love Never Dies in London (he was also cast in the notoriously unlucky musical Rebecca), recalled getting the Moulin Rouge! audition notice from his agent. “I said I wasn't going in,” he told Paul Wontorek on #LiveAtFive. “I just thought, ‘I don't think I'm that funny.’” His agent didn’t take it well. “They went, ‘You're going in.’” 

Mutu’s Duke has ended up being completely different from the one in the film. For starters, the musical—with a book by John Logan and direction by Alex Timbers—has amped up the love triangle. Now Satine (played by Karen Olivo) is torn between the penniless Christian (Aaron Tveit) and the more financially secure Duke. “As much as I love him in the movie—he's brilliant, [actor] Richard Roxburgh—you never ever thought that she would ever choose him,” explained Mutu. “Whereas in this version, for a significant amount of time within the show you think he is a viable option. So, we worked very hard to create that tension within the triangle.”

Part of that was to give the Duke a song where he woos Satine. In Moulin Rouge!, similar to the movie, when the characters are overcome with emotion, they sing modern pop songs. The musical samples everything from Elton John to Rihanna. Thus, every night, Mutu sings Riri’s hit song, “Only Girl (In the World),” which features the unforgettable lyric, “I want you to love me like I'm a hot ride.”

“It's so fun to say,” Mutu said with a smile. “The audience are like, ‘Did he really just say that?’ Yes, I did.” Mutu admits singing such lines with a straight face is challenging. “To try and keep playing the truth of a pop song is hard at times. Because some of the lyrics are crazy.” His other big song in the show is "Sympathy for the Duke," which mashes up three Rolling Stones songs—"Sympathy for the Devil," "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Gimme Shelter"—and it's his favorite to sing. 

Mutu is doing his job well, because audiences are treating the show like “a rock concert.” And his Duke has inspired a range of passionate reactions. Like during the tryout in Boston, when he was walking off stage toward the end of Moulin Rouge! “Someone shouted, I'm not joking, they went, 'You suck!’” he recalled. “For a second I stopped acting, and I was really personally offended.” Luckily, the heckles don’t happen every night, and Mutu's learned to take it with a smile. “I do get the occasional hiss. But all is forgiven.”

Moulin Rouge! is currently running on Broadway.

Watch Tam Mutu share more Moulin Rouge! stories and the story of how he fell in love with his wife Kristen Martin on #LiveAtFive.