Interview: After Leopoldstadt on Broadway, Joshua Malina Returns to a New Favorite in London

When Joshua Malina signed on to star in Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank at the Old Globe in San Diego, he never anticipated that it would rekindle his long-dormant love for theater.

The play is the story of two middle-aged Jewish couples, one relatively secular, the other Orthodox, and what happens when the wives, who used to be friends, revive an old childhood game where they speculate who among their gentile pals would save them if the Holocaust ever happened again. It’s a comedy.

When that run ended, Malina received an unexpected invitation to replace David Krumholtz in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. Malina acerbically credited his casting to director Patrick Marber being a big fan of The West Wing, where Malina played White House spokesperson Will Bailey. But as Malina found out, Marber knew what he was doing.

During his time in Leopoldstadt, Malina introduced Marber to Englander, and to the play that had reignited his passion for the stage. This connection sparked a collaboration between the director and writer on a new version of the text, one that incorporates the present-day Middle East conflict into the proceedings (the Old Globe production, staged by Barry Edelstein, took place in 2019). This revised edition has been such a success at London’s Marylebone Theatre that it’s enjoying a return engagement through February 15. And Malina is thrilled to be along for the ride.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I guess you and Patrick Marber set this this play up while you were doing Leopoldstadt together.
We became friends very quickly and I loved working with him. In the back of my mind — probably really in the fore of my mind — I wanted to return to this Nathan Englander play. I knew that Nathan and Patrick would hit it off; it’s a perfect combination of material and director. At some point, I told him to read it. I’m used to hoping things will happen as an actor and they never do. Everything falls apart. I don’t know how long it was after that when Patrick came back and said “I think I do have an interest in this.”

I got on the Nathan Englander bandwagon last year. I ended up getting his book Kaddish.com and I read it in like two afternoons. I didn’t want to put it down.
I loved Kaddish.com. I had read, I think, pretty much everything he had written. When I got the email from my agent saying, “You’ve been offered a play by Nathan Englander,” I was like “Nathan Englander? I didn’t even know he wrote plays.” As previously stated, whenever anything looks good, you know it’s always going to fall apart. But I read the play and it felt like it was written for me. It’s so good. It’s so funny. It expands the universe of the short story that I love. It took three years because of the pandemic to get the show going in San Diego.

I know Nathan has made a lot of edits between then and now.
The text itself is very different because October 7, 2023, happened, and Patrick and Nathan decided they had to do a major rewrite. The original production was set pre-pandemic, so that people weren’t wondering why we were socializing and not wearing masks. But the idea to set the play pre-October 7, I think it would have felt like a museum piece. To Nathan’s great credit, I’ve never met anybody more willing to just slash his own writing. I love the San Diego version that we did and stand by it. But it’s deeper and richer and funnier and more painful now.

I was going to say, you’re a Jewish actor, you’re outspoken, the title of the play itself is very confronting. With all that’s going on in the world, what were you expecting the audience reaction to be, and how did it turn out?
You never know how anything is going to be accepted. It all felt very up in the air.

We anticipated people seeing the title What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and going “Oh, that sounds Jewish.” People having a problem with the play based entirely on its title seemed like a possibility in this world were people get easily provoked and often will respond before they see it. And London, much like many places in the world, has antisemitism problems too, so I thought there might just be hate thrown at the play.

To my delight, that has not been the case. It was very well-received very quickly. I found what we found in San Diego, which is that the play speaks to a Jewish and non-Jewish audience. Ultimately, this is a play about friendship and family and faith and identity and love and anger. Those are universal things. I’m thrilled that we’re going back and doing it again.

It’s nice to see you bitten by the theater bug again after doing Leopoldstadt.
Completely. I’ve renounced the earning of money for the rest of my career. I’m all about theater now.

Perfect.
I can’t believe I took, essentially, a 30-year break. But I needed to earn money. That was a priority; I had kids. Now they’ve all graduated and I’m older. I can’t believe I was even offered a play, because that aspect of my career, which was the initial fire behind becoming an actor, had all but disappeared. And then I got this piece of material and completely got the bug again. You know, working in a Tom Stoppard play on Broadway was a bucket list item. Now I’m doing theater in London that I deeply care about. I can’t believe this late in the game for me that I’m still checking off professional bucket list items.

What do you think you’ve gained as an actor from this, from Leopoldstadt?
I never thought I’d say anything like this, but I gained a certain confidence. Leopoldstadt seems like the most unlikely thing ever to have happened to me. It was the first job where I legitimately thought “Can I do this?” Once you start working a little bit, you tend to get offered work in the same wheelhouse. I can play any kind of lawyer, and I enjoy it, but it’s rare that I get something tat makes me think “This might be beyond my abilities.”

With Leopoldstadt, I was just like, “How did I get this job?” I knew I was going to do it; there’s no way I wasn’t going to do a Tom Stoppard play on Broadway. But I’m not the biggest risk-taker in the world, and it felt like a risk. I felt I really could fall flat on my face, but I had to go for it. I remember saying to my parents at the end of the run, “I actually did that play, right?”

So maybe I’m capable of more than I initially thought. I have a super new fire to keep doing theater just because — and not to shit on my prior career; I have enjoyed doing tv and occasional film work —theater is just so much more fun.