“I had an emergency session with my therapist”: Why Will Brill's Tony-winning role made him get help

It’s not about Fleetwood Mac. Yes, the most Tony Award-nominated play in history is about an Anglo-American band of romantically entangled musicians grappling with fame, addiction, heartbreak and creative differences in the '70s, but "Stereophonic" swears that’s where the similarities end. And to play the play’s self-destructive British bass player Reg, actor Will Brill didn’t draw inspiration from Mick or Lindsey, but his own history.

"There was a very real moment early on when I didn't know if I could do this show," Brill recalled on "Salon Talks.” "I'm divorced, I'm sober, and these are the primary issues that Reg wrestles with." Fortunately, with an assist from his therapist, Brill got to a place "sane enough, happy enough, brave enough" to take the role all the way to a Tony Award win.

With the show’s run now extended, the Broadway veteran is grappling with some of the same tests of endurance the play’s fictional band is. “The whole cast has been having these really intense meetings with each other,” Brill said, “And we have never felt more like a band.” 

Brill, who’s known to television audiences as Midge’s brother Noah in "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," Scott Brown on "The OA" and a viperish, self-loathing Roy Cohn on Showtime’s "Fellow Travelers," also talked about why he believes the purpose of theater is "igniting the empathy engine in people," how he got the role of one of the 20th century’s most loathed figures, and his delight at our obsession with "The OA." "Who else learned all of those crazy movements and did them in your living room alone during the pandemic just to feel alive?" he asked. "Us."

Watch Will Brill on "Salon Talks" here or read our conversation below.

The following conversation has been lightly edited and clarity and length. 

Let's talk about this show. It's not a musical, it's a play with music.

No. 

Okay. So what is "Stereophonic"?

"Stereophonic" is a play about a band recording an album, but it is to explode that very specific scene. It is also about a group of artists creating a piece of art together. On an even more macro level, it's about one person and the fights they get in with themselves, how they compromise with themselves, how they negotiate against themselves and for themselves when making art or relationships, and how harrowing and fulfilling that process can be.

It is a band in the 1970s. It is an Anglo-American band with couples, but it's not Fleetwood Mac.

It's not Fleetwood Mac.

And you play Reg. Tell me a little bit about this guy, because you've also had a long journey with Reg.

My most recent text from [playwright] David Adjmi is him saying, "I'm sorry to sound like a broken record, but it is still flabbergasting to me that 10 years ago we met, and I had never seen you act before. And I said, 'You're going to be in this play someday.'" I mean, it's really bizarre. It was 2014 or '15. We met in a café. He had written seven pages of the show and didn't know me from Adam, but he said, "I really think you're going to be in this at some point." My relationship with Reg started there.

At the time, I was an alcoholic myself. I was drinking a lot. I was also engaged to be married. Now nine years later, I'm in a very different place on that journey. I'm divorced, I'm sober, and these are the primary issues that Reg wrestles with in this show. I've had a long journey with it artistically, temporally, emotionally, and I feel really lucky and bizarre to be in this place with it. I think there was a part of us that never expected the show to go at all. So for David and I to both have Tonys at the end of it or in the middle of it, is very peculiar.

You thanked your therapist in your Tony speech. You've referenced your therapist again and again and again on this decade-long journey. It took you a while to connect the dots between you and Reg. You didn't say, "Wait a minute, this guy's story sounds a little familiar"?

No, for sure not. It's such a weird thing. I think actors get into their characters in all different kinds of ways. For me, and I'm trying to move away from this actually, it starts with a voice. It starts with what the character sounds like. So the first time I read Reg, I thought, "Oh, this is what he sounds like." I knew exactly. It just felt like he was living in my imagination. That's where he started and ended.

Then there was a day in tech at Playwrights Horizons where I was two or three days off my antidepressants, and I was really going crazy. I had an emergency session with my therapist, and she was like, "Well, you're also going through this thing that really intensely parallels your real life." It was a true, “Oh my God, I can't believe I didn't see this earlier," moment.

Without her, I don't know that I would be well enough, sane enough, happy enough, brave enough to be tackling this kind of thing. There was a very real moment early on when I didn't know if I could do this show. It was really my therapist and my girlfriend talking me through the pros and cons that allowed me to dive in.

You've done challenging roles, you've done challenging things, but this is a uniquely daunting production. You are a band that was created for this show, of almost all non-musicians. You had to learn to play the bass for this.

I learned to play the bass. I I had learned to fake play guitar 12 years ago for a film project. That is so wildly different than having to actually play in front of 800 people every night. Fortunately, I had a really good teacher who was my teacher for both, and I shouted him out at the Tonys too, Robbie Mangano.

The whole show is so meta. An untalked about thing in the industry is in a long-running successful show like this, one of the gritty details is that the run is extending and all of the actors have to renegotiate our contracts in order to stay in it.

So the whole cast has been having these really intense meetings with each other about, "OK, what is important to you? What are you scared about?" And we have never felt more like a band. These are the really, really difficult talks. I was on the phone with the director today saying, "I kind of can't believe how moving and fulfilling this part of it is." This is the scariest part, and it's the most rewarding, because we're all being so supportive and so honest with each other.

And there's a real-ish studio on the stage, and when the mics are off, you talk to each other. There's a whole other side to this story that we don't know that you are inventing live, pretty much every night.

Yeah, that's right. That's so cool that you pick up on that, because I think people assume that when they see us back there and the lights are low and the microphones are off, that the show still is just happening as it is. But those are really amazing moments to be able to be with the rest of the cast and make a fart joke or just reach out and grab each other and say, "Everybody good? Are we OK? Is this show OK?" That's a really valuable time to have on stage. The little fishbowl, crucible, terrarium is a really special place for us and crazily, it is a working studio. When we play that music and the audience hears playback, that is the exact take that we just played, which is so cool.

And we don't know the band's name in the show, but you have a name.

We do. It's a secret. It is discoverable. It's out there. But I would love, in the spirit of “The OA,” go out there and do your research, see what you can find.

This is one of the biggest Broadway phenomenons in years. I don't want to say the H-word, but it is really taking off now on Spotify. People are really, really vibing with these songs. Talk about the music a little, because you're going to get great music.

Will Butler is so amazing. Will Butler and our sound designer Ryan Rumery and our music director, Justin Craig, have all been working on this music together for the past decade. They all signed on before there was a script, which is a really amazing thing that David [Adjmi] and Daniel Aukin, our director, were able to do, to assemble this team so that the whole thing could grow so organically. Will Butler is a musical genius. He was in Arcade Fire and is now embarking on a kind of a hybrid solo project with his wife's band Sister Squares. Anyway, he wrote this really amazing music. Then Justin Craig did this really amazing thing where he had these actors who were actors first, and musicians second, and he was able to take Will Butler's beautiful songs and craft them around these novice musicians without sacrificing any of the musical integrity.

So the songs sound amazing, and somehow we are able to play them. It's just a perfect storm. I didn't play bass at all before this, and there is a line in the play where [the character] Peter says to Reg, "I love that. I love that baseline. You have to keep that." And I'm doodling on my baseline. The baseline that I play in that moment is a bass line that I came up with when we were jamming on another song. Will Butler said, "Oh, that bass line is really cool. Can you actually put that in 'Seven Roads?'"— a song that we were trying to find the vibe of in the rehearsal room. It used to sound totally different.

Now I have a bass line in an original cast recording. It's something that I never would have dreamed of, but the whole show is sprinkled with that kind of stuff. The New Yorker called us out like, "'Drive' is going to rival ‘Espresso’ for the song of the summer," which was such a cool shout-out. I love the music. 

I’ve been going to Broadway shows my whole life. It feels a little different now. I open up my Playbill, and there is a long list now asking us to behave. "Please be patient. Please don't interact with the cast. Please be respectful of the people who work here."

I didn't know that.

As an actor who's been doing this for a long time, are you noticing that maybe audiences are acting out a little more? Are you finding a little worse behavior lately?

There is something about our show, because it's so documentary-esque, I think people maybe feel like they're being watched a little bit. There is this peculiar phenomenon. It's one thing to be in a 200-seat theater and say something outlandish and have the entire audience be stone still. But in a Broadway house with 800 people in the audience, that's rare. It's something that happens a lot in our show, and I don't particularly know what that's about. 

I've been in shows where people are yelling at the stage. I was in the production of “Our Town,” my first job in New York City. What was cool was it was a 27-member cast that ran the absolute gamut of ages. It was this generationally super diverse play. We had all of these stories about bad behavior in the theater, and you would not believe what people are willing to say to a cast. It's really nuts. So I don't personally feel that it has gotten worse, particularly on this show, but I might be spoiled.

I want to ask you about Roy Cohn. "Bully. Coward. Victim," as it says on the AIDS Quilt. You're playing a real person and doing it so well, so hateful, so horrible, and then absolutely heartbreaking. How did you approach this character?

I was so nervous because he is so iconic. I was given a real gift by that creative team. Generally when you audition for a project, you make a tape and then you're called in for casting, and then you're called in for the director, and then you're called in for the entire creative team and then all the producers. Somehow, this project, I sent in a tape and three weeks later got a call saying, "You're Roy Cohn." It was really bananas that I was given that amount of trust, and I felt a real responsibility in a number of directions. He has been played by some of the most iconic people alive.

Al Pacino.

Al Pacino, Nathan Lane. So to not break the mold, but to just fit into that canon is super daunting. And then also, like you said, he's this real person who had a very rich and very complicated life. So I watched the documentaries, "Bully. Coward. Victim." and "Where's My Roy Cohn?" which are both amazing in their own right. Then I read a biography called "Citizen Cohn" that really does a very great service to the understanding of this kind of person and the ability to have empathy. Roy died of AIDS. He died a month after I was born, in his 50s. The first chapter of the biography describes in detail what Roy specifically went through. And it's horrifying. It's really awful.

His mind was ravaged. He didn't know who he was. He didn't know who anyone around him was. The consensus of anybody who knew him in those late years was even the very worst among us, they don't deserve this. This contextualizes the terror of the human experience, the possibility of terror and the human experience. That was really eye-opening to me. 

Then a really important person who I talked to was Ivy Meeropol, who made the documentary "Bully. Coward. Victim." and is the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. To hear her have a very complicated and compassionate and intrigued interest in Roy was really moving and mind-blowing to me. I was like, "OK, if this person can have this kind of voracious interest in this person, then I think we all have the ability to." And then Ron Nyswaner wrote an extraordinarily human character, which I think is really brave and really tough to do with a historically reviled person.

Does that change now how you look at some of our contemporary bully, coward, victims?

Definitely. It's hard. It's really hard to have compassion for somebody who has an outsized amount of power and wields it unkindly. That is real. It's really hard to find compassion for those people. But at the end of the day, everybody is a human being. And if you're going to take on the mantle of portraying one of those people, you have to put your own personal judgment aside. That is the thing, for better and for worse, that theater is – theater and art is for igniting the empathy engine in people.

I read an interview with you where you said, "I love New York. I hate New York. I'll never leave." For those looking at New York from the outside and those of us inside, this is a tough town to love. How do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning, Will, and feel like, "I'm never going to leave"?

It is so tough. I'm sure you can see I am schvitzing, I am so hot and sweaty. It's so intense. For me, the summer is really the most difficult time in New York City. It smells bad. We're all just like sweating constantly. It feels like you're swimming through a jacuzzi when you're going to work. But at the same time, I am doing the thing that I love most in the world. I don't get to do this anywhere else in the world. I'm on Broadway playing one of the most complicated characters I've ever played. And my community is here. There was a moment where I was really convinced that I was going to leave New York. When I was playing Roy we filmed in Toronto, and I was like, "OK, here's how it happens. I'm going to fall in love with Canadians and I'm going to peace out on this country."

I just wound up missing the theater community really badly, missing my people and realizing that we have a really special tribe here. I just saw “Merrily We Roll Along.” It just closed. And the catchphrase of that show is, "Who's like us? Damn few." I think that applies to artists and theater artists and New Yorkers, and really anybody who has close friends.

And “OA” fans.

And "OA" fans. Who else learned all of those crazy movements and did them in your living room alone during the pandemic just to feel alive? Us. So yeah, you get it.