Gracie Lawrence on Starring with Jonathan Groff in Just in Time, Channeling a Music Icon and the Beautiful Humiliation of Acting

Age: 28

Hometown: New York City

Current Role: Gracie Lawrence plays singer and actress Connie Francis in the Bobby Darin musical Just in Time, starring Jonathan Groff and directed by Alex Timbers at Circle in the Square Theatre.

Credits: Gracie is best known for her soul-pop band Lawrence, which she fronts with her brother Clyde. She starred as Kacey Baker on the Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble series Sex Lives of College Girls, joining the show’s main cast for season three. Her screen credits also include The Americans, Younger and Billions. She made her Broadway debut at 12 in the 2009 revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs.

Family Business
Playing in the living room for the grandparents became performing for kids at school became signing up for open mic nights and so on. That’s how Lawrence explains gigging at bars around New York City by the age of 13. “I had to get parent permission to get into the venues that I was playing as a child,” she says, looking back on the early days of Lawrence, the band she started with her older brother Clyde. She grew up in a house of artists: her mother a dance teacher, her father the screenwriter behind many a crowd-pleasing comedy (Miss Congeniality’s FBI agent Gracie Hart did not get her name by coincidence). It’s the kind of upbringing that makes Lawrence’s next statement plausible for a preteen: “I was such a Neil Simon fan,” she says. At 12, Lawrence made her Broadway debut as Laurie Morton in a 2009 revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, directed by David Cromer with a dream cast that included Laurie Metcalf and Jessica Hecht. The show only ran for nine post-opening performances, but its effects were long-lasting. “It sparked this incredible desire to be an actor and to hopefully get back on the stage one day.”

Never Enough, and Always Too Much
“I've spent my entire life auditioning for things and being incredibly desperate and not cool,” says Lawrence. Most recently, the hustle landed her on season three of Sex Lives of College Girls as steadily reforming pageant girl Kacey Baker. “I made lifelong friends on that show,” Lawrence says. “The women were so supportive and amazing, and we got to talk about things on that show that I think were really important.” Kacey is a reluctant theater kid who, despite her best efforts to avoid the school musical, buttons the season with a fiery rendition of The Greatest Showman’s “Never Enough.” In contrast, the real-life teenage Lawrence had no qualms singing Wicked tunes on the five-minute bus ride that shuttled kids to gym class. “My best friend and I would sing ‘For Good’ and everyone would be like, ‘Shut up, you guys are so annoying.’ We’d be like, ‘You don’t understand art.’”

“The Coolest Thing That’s Ever Happened to Me”
For Lawrence, Just in Time was the first job that didn’t put up a fight. Director Alex Timbers was a fan of her band, knew of her Broadway background and reached out asking if she was interested in hearing about the project. “Say less,” was her reaction. “I grew up listening to a lot of music from the late ‘60s, early ‘70s,” she says. “What's been really fun about Lawrence is that we've taken a lot of inspiration from that period of time. And then for Just In Time, it's a hair earlier—late ‘50s, early ‘60s. So I'm kind of expanding my musical knowledge.” She also gets to indulge in her favorite nerd culture. “As a musician, I’m obsessed with learning about female musicians and their stories. Getting the opportunity to be paid to read about Connie Francis has been a real luxury.” And then there’s the Groff factor. “There is not a better person,” Lawrence says of her leading man and onstage love interest. “I could just gush about him forever.”

Great Singers Steal
“There's so much that I aspire to and there's so much that I'm learning from her,” Lawrence says of Francis, a chart-topping vocalist who hid the more “outrageous” parts of her personality behind a shy poise. “The trippy, meta experience of playing a woman in music from a different generation has been so fulfilling.” She’s studied Francis’ voice, not to cook up an impression (“I felt like that might be almost more disingenuous”) but to bring Francis’ musicality to her own instrument. “In her earlier years, she hits notes incredibly head on, and there's not a lot of vibrato,” says Lawrence, one expert admiring another. “When we think about clean voices, they're kind of sweet and maybe don't have as much grit. She manages to have a really sweet sound while also having so much power behind it, which I really like.” Every vocal nuance is “a nod to how she would fill the spaces of her songs,” Lawrence explains. “When there are these little moments that we can steal, they go a really long way.”

Downsizing
At Circle in the Square, an approximately 750-seater in the round, Lawrence can confirm, “You see every single person. Every note is heard.” Lawrence the band has played stadiums, opening for the Jonas Brothers and the Rolling Stones. And in their own right, they've graduated to 3,000-5,000-seat venues. But to her new Broadway home, Gracie says, “I’m obsessed.” She admits it can be “really scary as a performer,” but "to have the experience of singing these epic songs, having these big emotions in this intimate setting is really exciting. It feels incredibly alive in the room.”

Homesick
“The whole thing is about what it means to be a performer,” Lawrence says, summing up Just in Time. Asked if her view of her job has changed since her days as a gigging tween, she's charmingly frank. “I want to say yes to sound evolved, but I actually think that so much of what I love about performing is that you retain so much of who you were as a kid. The whole imaginative part of you gets to stay so intact.” Then comes an unblinking truth: “Acting is a really weird job,” she says. “In some ways, it's deeply humiliating. But I think to save it from being a humiliating pursuit, you have to be so willing to be imaginative and tap into that side of yourself in front of so many people—and that's what I love about it the most. Everything I loved about it as a kid is still what I love about it now, and I'm trying so hard as I get older to maintain that exact feeling.”

*Photos shot at the Civilian Hotel NYC