Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal to Star in Othello on Broadway

Tony and Academy Award winner Denzel Washington and Tony and Academy Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal are set to star in a 2025 Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s Othello, directed by Kenny Leon. Washington will play the title character, a jealousy-prone soldier; Gyllenhaal will play the cunning villain Iago.

On Broadway, Washington won a Tony Award in 2010 for his performance in Fences, directed by Leon, and earned a Tony nomination in 2018 for his performance in The Iceman Cometh. Washington and Leon's last collaboration was in the 2014 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play and earned Leon the Tony for Best Direction.

On screen, Washington has won Academy Awards for his performances in Glory and Training Day. His Shakespearean roles include the title role in Richard III at the Public Theater, Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing and, most recently, Macbeth in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. He also played Othello while studying drama at Fordham University.

On Broadway, Gyllenhaal has starred in Constellations, Sunday in the Park with George and Sea Wall/A Life, earning a Tony nomination for the latter. He earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Brokeback Mountain.

Gyllenhaal has said that seeing Washington’s performance in Glory as a young boy inspired him to be an actor. “[W]atching Denzel Washington in the scene where he looks in the camera while he's being whipped… I remember ... the way he looks in the camera and the performance in that moment ... with great vulnerability and great strength in the same moment. And I realized that was something I wanted to strive for. Not only as an actor, but also as a person.”

The show is expected to open in spring 2025 in a theater owned by the Shubert Organization. Further casting has not been announced.