Jeremy Jordan Unlocks The Great Gatsby's Anti-Hero for His First New Broadway Musical in Over a Decade

Believe it or not, the last character Jeremy Jordan originated in a Broadway musical was his breakout role as intrepid paper boy Jack Kelly in Disney’s Newsies in 2012. He’s been back to Broadway since then—in 2018 as a smarmy police officer in the Christopher Demos-Brown play American Son, and again in 2019 as one of Waitress’ quirky Dr. Pomatter. But it’s taken F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby to get one Broadway’s strongest male voices back on stage and sending a brand-new score (penned by Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen) to the rafters.

“It’s been a really long time for me since I’ve sung on a Broadway stage,” Jordan tells Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. “It still feels great every time. It’s exciting.” Opening the show April 25 at the Broadway Theatre, Jordan stars as Jay Gatsby, the millionaire with a mysterious past and a desperate need to reconnect with his old flame Daisy (Eva Noblezada) as the hedonistic 1920s roar on. It’s a role that’s been played on screen by the likes of Alan Ladd, Robert Redford and, as today’s audiences are likely to remember best, Leonardo DiCaprio—leaving Jordan the task of finding his own Gatsby, unimpeded by those memorable performances.

“There’s a couple things that I say in the show that I’ve heard DiCaprio say and it’s still really hard for me to get his version of that iconic line out of my head,” Jordan says. “I try to remove myself from that and sort of create Gatsby from scratch in our own way.” To do that, he started with a basic question: “What kind of person would literally go to the ends of the earth and somehow become the richest person in Long Island over the course of a very short period of time just because he wants to get a girl?” His answer: “Not the most stable human being.”

It's a simple insight that’s informed Jordan’s Gatsby-esque affects and mannerisms, drawing a man awash in neuroses and who craves control to the point of implosion. Fitzgerald’s anti-hero may be a challenging man to decipher, but as a character defined by his unanswered questions and shadowy corners, he’s an actor’s dream, allowing for endless interpretation and reinterpretation.

And with little to no overlap in real-life characteristics, for Jordan, this project lands fully in the category of character study. “I’m just like—trying to drink tea,” he says, scoffing at the idea of one of Gatsby’s gin-soaked parties as the sleep-deprived father of an almost-five-year-old. “I don’t go to any parties,” he adds. “It is a rare occasion that you will see me at a party.” Still, there’s one small thing he and his enigmatic counterpart have in common. “Everything he does is kind of an act,” says Jordan about Gatsby, a figure cut by smoke and mirrors. “I mean, that’s kind of what we do in this business to be honest with you,” he tells Fadal. “We’re all play-pretending.”