Interview: Will Brill on The Musical, Kramer/Fauci, and Playing Men You Can't Help But Root For

Will Brill has spent the past few years playing men who are difficult to root for, but somehow making audiences root for them anyway.

In Stereophonic, Brill won a Tony for playing Reg, the volatile drummer whose increasingly destructive behavior threatens to tear apart his band. Now, in the new film The Musical, he plays Doug Leibowitz, a frustrated playwright and middle school theater teacher who sets out to sabotage his nemesis by staging an outrageously inappropriate school musical. And soon, Brill will take on a very different kind of combustible figure: Dr. Anthony Fauci in Daniel Fish’s Kramer/Fauci, coming to St. Ann’s Warehouse September 27 after a run at NYU Skirball earlier this year.

In this conversation, Brill (who also starred this year in Meet the Cartozians and Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret, two plays by his partner, the playwright Talene Monahon) discusses finding the surprisingly relatable humanity in characters like Doug and Reg, his unexpected path to Kramer/Fauci, and the time he cold-emailed Fauci himself to invite him to see the show.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I watched The Musical and I was like, “If Mr. Holland’s Opus and Election had a love child, and that love child was Cartman from South Park, that would be this movie.”
[Laughs] That’s exactly right.

How did it come your way?
I got sent the script, and it was so immediately identifiable to me who this guy was. I had a Zoom with Giselle Bonilla, the director, and she was like, “When I saw your Tonys speech, I was like, ‘This is the bizarro-world version of Doug. This is Doug if everything in his life went right.'” And I was like, That’s interesting. Because I feel like if Doug made it in the industry, even a hair, he would see how much more hellish and cutthroat it is than he could possibly imagine, which is one of the funny things about the movie.

Anyway, I basically begged her to let me be in it, and she was like, “Wow, this is not how I thought this meeting was gonna go. I thought I was gonna be begging you.” So it was really love at first sight for both of us.

Did you have to do much to find this guy inside you?
I wish I did. I wish, I wish, I wish. I wish the story were like, “Yeah, I had to find a person who can show me what resentment and the desire for revenge looks like.” But no, it’s so identifiable. I think that’s part of the thing people enjoy about it. So many people have come up to me, and this was the case with Reg from Stereophonic too, and they’re like, “Oh, I really feel for him. I really want him to succeed.”

But they’re both so self-destructive.
Reg is fully bringing down the recording studio around him. He’s belligerently screaming at his wife in front of everyone. He steals a guy’s girlfriend. He sort of pretends to get sober but doesn’t. Doug is screaming at the kids and trying to ruin the livelihood of his boss and his ex-girlfriend. And people pull for these guys. I don’t know if it’s a superpower of mine or dumb luck, but I seem to have a thing for people who, on paper, are villains but have a likeable streak in them, so you want them to succeed for some reason.

There is a sheer determination to these guys.
There’s a certain admiration for somebody who’s got that kind of stick-to-itiveness—the person who doesn’t give up on the revenge fantasy and is like, “No, I’m going to write a full script and songs.”

Dr. Fauci is a far more likeable role. How did that come about?
The whole thing was Daniel Fish’s idea. He had been thinking about it forever. When Tom Ryan [who plays Larry Kramer] and I did Uncle Vanya, Tom was like, “Daniel has been thinking of this Kramer/Fauci thing, and I’m going to suggest you for it.” I remember thinking at the time that it would never happen. When Daniel approached me about it, I was so flabbergasted. It wasn’t even an audition. He was just like, “Let’s see if we can make this thing.”

You’re listening to the real voices of Fauci and Kramer in earpieces during the show. Is that not distracting?
It’s hard. But there is a thing that happens. Because you practice with it so much, you will learn every moment of it. Every stumble. These are the parts that I live for. Fauci will say something weird, and you can hear him trying to figure out what was weird about the thing he just said. At one point, he says, “I think the proof of the pudding is…” and you’re like, “That’s not the phrase.” He stumbles over it and then course-corrects.

What happens when you have learned it so precisely is that you start doing it at the exact same time they’re doing it. You get into a flow state where you are completely in rhythm with the person. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done.

You basically cold-called Fauci and invited him to see it.
I emailed him to invite him to the show—his email address is really easy to find—like, “Hey, if nobody’s invited you, you should come. I think it’s cool.” And he emailed me back 15 minutes later. He came, and he was like, “That was a good performance. I really enjoyed myself. You did a good job.”

He was so exactly like your grandpa who never goes to see theater and doesn’t know what to say afterward. I’m stoked that we get to do it again in the wake of people being so mean to him.