Groff, who grew up in Lancaster, Pa., stated, “I do know after I was a child, theater was like an escape for me, as a closeted teenager. And I feel I actually relate to when Frank says, ‘Music is my life, with out music, I’d die.’ Musical theater at that age was, like, lifesaving. And so to be now, at 38, doing a musical as a extra absolutely realized model of who I’m … I at all times went to theater to flee and to precise and get out of my life utterly. And it’s like this present — and perhaps that is what makes it so distinctive and what introduced me to this expertise — this present is each the escape and bringing me into my very own life on the identical time.”
Mendez, who described rising up in California as a “Mexican Jew,” attended a largely white faculty in Orange County “the place nobody thought I belonged” and the place she was instructed that as an actor, she would have a restricted future, if any. When she arrived in New York at 18, she found, like Groff, “that New York and theater was the place I used to be accepted, after I felt like I wasn’t accepted anyplace else.”
By 2018, she had racked up a considerable record of stage credit and gained a Tony for her efficiency that 12 months in “Carousel.” However when she moved again to Los Angeles to do a tv sequence, her life started to really feel unsettled.
When Groff, whom she knew casually, referred to as her to say {that a} casting agent had stated she can be good for the a part of Mary, she had change into a mom and was newly divorced. “I used to be like, I don’t dwell in New York anymore, and I don’t know who I actually am proper now. I really feel actually misplaced. How am I going to do that?” Mendez stated.
“However by some means, magically, all of it simply labored. And after I received again right here, the primary day I walked in with them, it was similar to, Oh my God, I’m house. And I do know who I’m and what I’m made to do. In fact I ended up right here. There was no different place to finish up.”
