Amalia Yoo Makes a Primal Scream of Her Broadway Debut in John Proctor is the Villain

Age: 22

Hometown: New York City

Current Role: Amalia Yoo plays preacher’s daughter Raelynn Nix in John Proctor is the Villain, a coming-of-age play by Kimberly Belflower set in a high school English classroom where a group of teen girls rethink the hero of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. 

Credits: Yoo played Leila Kwan Zimmer in the Netflix teen drama series Grand Army. She also appeared in the 2023 romantic comedies The Other Zoey and No Hard Feelings. On stage, she performed in Atlantic Theater Company's 2025 off-Broadway production of Grief Camp. 

Wolf Pack
Raised by a pair of teachers in Lower Manhattan, Yoo grew up with the city-kid privilege of having Broadway in her backyard. “We got to go see Broadway shows all the time,” she says from the stage of the Booth Theatre where she now performs eight times a week. Her earliest trips were to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, eventually—and prophetically—seeing her first straight play in 2016: “My mom and I saw the Crucible that Saoirse Ronan was in,” she says. The menacing Ivo van Hove revival, staged inside a classroom, included a cameo by a wolf look-alike named Luchta who stared down audiences with a pair of piercing blue eyes. “I just remember being so affected by it,” says Yoo. “I thought all of the women were so powerful. I was like, ‘I want to do something like that one day.’” John Proctor’s raucous young women now descend on a classroom of their own—a commonality Yoo delights in as she nestles into the desk she claims for her character Raelynn. “It’s beyond my wildest dreams,” she says—barring one exception: “We don't have a live wolf.”

Class Participation
“I was going to do Nina in The Seagull,” says Yoo about her brush with Chekhov her senior year at LaGuardia High School, New York City’s prestigious, arts-centric public school. “But then it was COVID.” It’s a timeline that coincidentally aligns with John Proctor: We meet Raelynn in a junior English class in spring 2018. The similarities end there. “Raelynn is very scared to speak up—I was pretty outspoken in English class,” she remembers. “I was always the girl who was looking at the books we were reading from an intersectional feminist lens. I was like, ‘Well, we have to remember that all of the characters in this book are white and they're men and they're rich.’ That kind of conversation was encouraged, which I think was so great.” Her school’s creative stew was what she loved most. “To be surrounded by other artists was the best thing ever,” Yoo says. “You're sitting in math class with these people one second, and then the next, you're seeing them do a jazz solo and you're completely blown away.”

First-Day Jitters
“They organized a dinner for all of us to meet,” says Yoo, recounting the first gathering of the John Proctor cast. “I remember being so nervous and thinking everyone was so cool.” The next day was the promotional photo shoot—when five strangers had to casually slouch and cuddle on a bathroom floor as if they’d been friends since diapers. “It was a 12-hour day,” Yoo says. “We all were running around this giant Catholic school in Astoria. It was super fun to get to be in an actual school with all of these people and feel what that felt like.” In rehearsal, director Danya Taymor kept the bonding going: Mirror exercises, partner projects, devised memory plays. “I think all of that stuff created a super safe, welcoming environment for all of us to get to know each other.” As for Yoo and Sadie Sink, who spend the play laughing and crying and dancing together as friends in tumult, there was a bonus ingredient: “A lot of smoothie runs.”

Goody Goody
“It's exhausting and it's cathartic,” says Yoo—talking about the no-holds-barred sprint of energy the play requires from her and Sink at the end of every show. “The fourth wall throughout this play is super porous, and I think in that moment especially, it becomes the most porous.” She offers a few details, avoiding spoilers. “It's me performing as Raelynn performing as Goody Proctor, so I have a lot of layers of protection. And I have Sadie to ground me.” Yoo adds, “It's also very grounding, in that moment, to think about the people who are sitting in the audience. You see people out of the corner of your eye holding each other, wiping tears off their faces.” Moments later, she’s standing in front of them, lights up, taking her bow. “I try to look at people,” she says. “We were just in this together.”

Styling Credits: Hair: Chelsea Gehr | Makeup: Alexa Hernandez