Jonathan Groff reflects on the heartwarming moment he came out to his brother
“I went to Italy when I was 23. It was the first time I had left the country or traveled by myself. It was June 2008, and I had just finished doing Spring Awakening on Broadway for two years. Over a week, I visited Assisi, Siena, and Florence before meeting my brother in Rome, following the Rick Steves guidebook to the letter. On my last day alone, I went to see David at the Accademia Gallery. When you turn the corner, there are rows of other unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo. These figures are so constricted, like they’re straining to be released from the marble and fighting for air. I ached just looking at them. But they lead up to this perfect, liberated form. I started crying and wondered, What is it about this naked man that makes me so emotional? Afterward, I sat in a piazza, journaling, thinking about how nobody here knew or cared about me, and I decided to come out to my brother—who is also named David—the next day. Only my roommate knew I was gay, because he was also my secret boyfriend. I took the train to Rome, and David and I spent the day as tourists. In the evening, we went to this restaurant called Saby’s near our hotel, the Locarno. We were getting pasta, we were getting wine, and I knew that if I didn’t tell him right then, I would never do it. My hands were shaking; my voice was hoarse from talking, because I hadn’t spoken to anyone in seven days. But David also seemed nervous. He said, ‘Jonathan, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’ He told me all about this girl that he was in love with, who is now his wife. It was like he was coming out to me, because we’d never talked about relationships or sex or love in our entire lives as brothers. He teed it up perfectly, and once he gave me all of the details, he said, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever felt this, and I’m wondering, What about you?’ And I shared everything with him. We just showed all of ourselves to each other. It never could have happened anywhere else.”CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER
Stephen Sondheim’s musical about the long, complicated friendships of a trio of creatives, which was savaged by critics when it first debuted in 1981, has been rethought and restaged in an acclaimed revival that is now back on Broadway. Correspondent Rita Braver talks with stars Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, and director Maria Friedman, about bringing a work by one of the greats of musical theater to new light.
Jonathan did another photohsoot this time for Man About Town to promote Matrix. Check out the photoshoot in our gallery and read the interview below:
Jonathan Groff has frozen and keeps tripping out on my screen. We both laugh, appreciative of the irony given we’re catching up with the frozen star about his role in the much-anticipated new matrix film. Once we finally overcome technical issues, the 36-year-old spots we are both proud owners of exactly the same beyoncé merch – a black sweatshirt with ‘surfboard’ written in pink. We discuss groff’s incredible musical career to date and how it all began before turning our attention to the matrix resurrections.
On how he spent COVID
Lockdown was kind of life-changing. I got a house right before COVID right near my dad’s horse farm. My dad trains and races horses for a living. I knew I wanted to always go back to Pennsylvania at some point in my life to be near my family. And when I was living there with my friend Katie during COVID, I had this dream in the back of my brain through the years that I wanted to turn my dad’s horse farm into an artist retreat. Being there and re-falling in love with the Amish landscape and the stars and nature fast-tracked this whole thing. It was a huge realigning moment for me. I also did a movie club with my friends where we would watch classic movies and we did it for an entire year. Bertoluci’s 1900 was a very polarising movie. I remember there was some members of the group that really went with that, and then there were others that were not going with it.
On how his upbringing shaped his acting career
It’s a combination of growing up in this idyllic, natural environment where the summers were spent with my brother and our friends putting on plays in my dad’s barn. I was Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz there and we were running through the fields and it was very free, open and creative. Then on the flip side, I understand how much doing community theatre and high school theatre. Acting was a culmination of joy and at the same time, it was great kind of therapy and an outlet for self-expression so growing up in that conservative area allowed me great freedom and creativity, but it also was quite repressing in certain ways, which I think is why I reached for acting.
The Tony Award-winning actor is the new Agent Smith in The Matrix Resurrections. He meets with GQ for a workout, a beer, and a wide-ranging conversation about his attempts to connect with the world around him. Check out the photoshoot in our gallery and read the interview below:
“You can quit at any time,” Jonathan Groff informs me with the paternal kindness of a guidance counsellor, and I am at least 80 per cent serious when I inform him that I will never quit. A proud correspondent of GQ always wants to be up for an adventure, even if that adventure is only “going to the gym,” and specifically “going to the gym with the new Agent Smith, to learn firsthand how he trained to fight Keanu Reeves for The Matrix Resurrections, the latest iteration of the iconic action franchise.” Groff’s nickname on set was ‘The Savage’, owing to the intensity with which he embraced the physicality of the fight scenes. He’s always looked like a cartoon prince, but Matrix prep has blessed him with core strength. Meanwhile, this correspondent has the muscle tone of a candy cane, and a pathological allergy to bicep curls.
Nevertheless, here we are within the well-lit expanse of Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers Fitness gym, changing side by side in the locker rooms and preparing for what a publicist has described as a quick workout but in reality is three sets of four circuits comprising three separate routines, which in conjunction will unlock the latent potential of muscles and tendons I didn’t know existed. Groff is the expert here, though he’d never weight trained before he landed his part in the Matrix sequel. He’d never filmed any kind of fight scene, period, and was mildly stunned when director Lana Wachowski offered him the role of Smith, one of action cinema’s more indelible villains and also a peerless ass-kicker. “It seemed so far from what I had done or what I was – I couldn’t understand why she asked me to do this, really,” he says. Read the Full Interview @ GQ
