Hannah Cruz Talks Chess, Working With Lea Michele and the Long Game of Filming Merrily We Roll Along

Chess star Hannah Cruz first moved to New York City in 2011, where she worked as a babysitter, in coffee shops, as a caterer and an extra on TV shows. "I would try and take acting classes and singing lessons and stay up on the craft and see as much as I could. But there were lots of swaths of not working," she says. She played Eliza on the Hamilton national tour pre-pandemic, where she met her now-husband. In 2024, Cruz won a Clarence Derwent Award for both her Broadway debut in Suffs and her performance in The Connector off-Broadway. The award is typically given to new artists for the most promising performances of the season. Cruz, now playing the role of Svetlana in Chess, is well on her way to Grandmaster status. She sat down with Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek to share the surrealist nature of working with Lea Michele, details about her role as Gussie in the not-so-upcoming Merrily We Roll Along film and that blondes really do have more fun.

Svetlana Sergievsky, Anatoly's estranged wife in Chess and iconic blonde whose wig is Cruz’s “favorite thing [she’s] ever worn ever,” is the first person who is onstage by herself in the entire show. With an entrance that intense, Cruz had her work cut out for her. “I've never watched Love Island, but I feel like it's akin to a bombshell entering the villa,” Cruz says. “It's a unique challenge to enter when the show is already rolling and to really be jumping on not only a moving train, but a bullet train.”

Instead of letting that pressure get to her, Cruz reframed it as an opportunity to connect with the audience. “I also really like the opportunity to have a one-on-one with the audience and introduce myself in a way that feels really intimate and human.”

With a character that packs a punch and a cast full of Broadway veterans, Cruz had to learn to not “Svet It,” as her Broadway.com vlog title describes. “I have to quell the fangirl inside of myself because it's still really crazy. Lea to me is probably one of the craziest people I've gotten to work with in that she's been in my life and my mind's eye for so long, and getting to be as close with her as I get to be and to be as silly and playful as we get to be backstage is not lost on me how cool that is.”

Luckily, she had support from her husband Edred Utomi, who is currently playing the title role in Hamilton just a few steps away from the Imperial Theatre at the Richard Rogers Theatre. "He did it in July on Broadway for three weeks and he was like, 'This would have been so much cooler if you were still on Broadway.' And I was like, 'You're right. I'll get back on Broadway and we'll do it together again,'" she recalls. “Yesterday, we had two shows and he came over between shows and we watched Love Is Blind in my dressing room,” shares Cruz. “I was like, this is heaven. This is actually heaven.”

Between performing eight shows a week, recording the upcoming Chess cast album and preparing for this year’s Broadway Backwards benefit concert, Cruz would have every excuse in the world to take time off. Yet, she’s added even more to her plate, taking on the role of Gussie in Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along film for Netflix, opposite Paul Mescal, Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein.

“I had done The Connector,” Cruz says, “and [book writer] Jonathan Marc Sherman is adapting the [Merrily We Roll Along] script. He texted me one night and was like, ‘Would you want to play Gussie in the movie?’ And I was like, ‘This is a joke.’” That “joke” became a blissful reality for Cruz, filming every other December so that Merrily itself can grow with the cast. “To watch myself age like that, I think is gonna be so emotional to watch, especially because it's backwards to forwards. I can't really conceptualize it right now,” she admits.

With Merrily We Roll Along expected to be in production until 2040, it will definitely be a while before audiences can see it. It’s one thing to get older while filming in real time, but another thing to grow with the character altogether. This feeling is something Cruz is familiar with. "I do feel like I've learned so much on every job and I see myself continuing to grow, which I think is the coolest thing about this job," she says. "You're never done and you're only going to, hopefully, get better with the jobs that you do."

Watch the full interview below, and catch Cruz in Chess at the Imperial Theatre.

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