At Laurel Elementary School, five-year-old Will Brill ‘04 learned a song called “The Ghost of Bleak House.” At his family’s Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks later, he stood up from the table and performed the song start to finish in front of the entire guest list. The next day, his parents took him out of soccer and signed him up for local youth theater.
It didn’t take long for Brill’s parents to see they had made the right decision: their son immediately immersed himself in the world of performing, participating in as many productions as possible at both school and children’s theaters across the Peninsula. Earlier this year, their choice was validated once again when Brill won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. It was just one of many accolades he’s received for his work in Broadway mega-hit Stereophonic.
But getting to the Tonys wasn’t a smooth journey. While Brill’s love for performing—both as an actor and a magician—persisted throughout his youth, just about everything else in his high school life was constantly changing.
“My high school experience was raucous,” Brill said. He started high school at local private school Menlo, but was expelled his sophomore year for making fake IDs.
“It was really f*cked up, actually,” Brill said. “The school expelled me and another kid who was making the IDs, and there were these two kids who were selling them for us who had already been accepted into college, so the school suspended them—basically made them take a year off—and didn’t tell their colleges why they were being suspended.”
“So these other kids just took a year-long vacation,” Brill continued with a spiteful laugh. “One of them learned jazz piano with his year off, and the other traveled the world for a year.”
But while his business partners were off learning new talents, Brill was starting his junior year at M-A as a transfer student. He co-directed a production of Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon for the M-A theater department—the single show he participated in at M-A. Because after only one semester of junior year at M-A, Brill transferred to Woodside High School.
“I had a big crush on a girl who was going to Woodside, which was in the District, so I just decided to switch schools,” he said.
Woodside wasn’t a perfect fit either. “I made some really good friends at Woodside, but it wasn’t really gelling,” Brill said. So, he made his way to high school number four. This time, his eyes were set on Gunn, a public school in Palo Alto home to many of his friends from extracurricular theater. He found his way in by pretending that he lived with his aunt and uncle who lived in the Palo Alto school district’s boundaries.
After graduating from Gunn, Brill made his way to Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. “I always wanted to be either an actor or a magician,” he said, “and there were never any other serious professions I ever thought I might have.”
Even so, there was one specific moment that made Brill realize he was committed to the acting path. At age 13, he was cast as P.T. Barnum in the musical Barnum at San Jose Children’s Musical Theater. In the show, Barnum has an affair, his marriage falls apart, and he loses loved ones. “It’s a very complex, adult, sad piece of theater,” Brill said. “And I remember being like, ‘Okay, this is what I like. And I think I have the capacity to wrestle with these things.’”
For Brill, acting has always been about play, and he’s kept that as his central philosophy from the Woodside stage to Broadway and TV.
“I got to college and realized that there were people who were trying to be really serious, rigorous artists,” Brill said. “And I, all bold and italic, was like, ‘Well, we are all dressing up in unitards and playing pretend. So let’s keep that in mind.’”
We are all dressing up in unitards and playing pretend. So let’s keep that in mind.
Will Brill
Brill has since starred in a variety of theater, including an off-Broadway revival of Our Town when fresh out of college in 2009 and a Broadway production of You Can’t Take It With You in 2014.
He was also cast in a big studio movie soon after graduating. “I got paid a ton of money, and then the movie tanked. It was a gigantic flop,” he said, adding that the budget was around $35 million and the box office sales landed at around half a million dollars.
Other on-camera ventures were more successful: Brill has been featured as a recurring character on hit TV shows The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The OA, as well as in films including thrillers Ride and To The Moon.
Still, as is true for many young New York City artists, finding work wasn’t easy for Brill.
“There were times when I bought one-way tickets home to California because I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to make rent. But then some friend would be like, ‘Don’t do that. Come sleep on my couch for a month and we’ll figure it out.’ Then I would book something,” he said.
“I had a very strong resiliency,” Brill added. “I slept on my friend’s floor for six months, whereas other people would have been like, ‘Oh, this is not for me. I have to find another career.’ I was kind of too dumb to give up on it.”
I had a very strong resiliency. I slept on my friend’s floor for six months, whereas other people would have been like, ‘Oh, this is not for me. I have to find another career.’ I was kind of too dumb to give up on it.
Will Brill
Brill kept auditioning for projects while also participating in readings and workshops his industry friends invited him to. He was getting his “name out there and trying to keep busy.”
Most recently, Brill was cast in Stereophonic, a play that follows a fictional rock band in the late 1970s as they record a new album and combat both personal and communal struggles.
Stereophonic is set in the Bay Area—Sausalito, to be exact—bringing in a personal connection for Brill. “I have a big monologue in the show about the houseboats in Sausalito, and that moment is a very technically demanding piece of text, but it also feels really natural. It feels like I could just ramble about Sausalito and my love of the Bay Area infinitely,” Brill said.
Premiering off-Broadway in 2023 and on Broadway in 2024, the show has become a record-breaking production in terms of critical acclaim and public success. In fact, it made headlines as the most Tony-nominated play in history with 13 nominations. The play won five of those 13, including the award for Best Play as well as Best Featured Actor in a Play. The latter went to Brill.
Brill’s Tony acceptance speech—in which he thanked his therapist and bass teacher—went semi-viral, with an outpouring of love from the theater community for his authentic and enthusiastic words.
In April, Brill and the rest of the Broadway Stereophonic cast will make a move from New York to London for a West End run. The show will also likely move from stage to screen sometime in the next few years, but Brill said he’s not sure if he’ll be invited to be in it.
“This business is really hard and unpredictable,” he said. “I take what I can get.”
Brill’s advice to current students: “Enjoy yourselves. If you’re on a path doing a thing that is not bringing you joy, identify what that thing is and change it. Life is about enjoying yourself. Every single day is a new opportunity to choose what you wanna do for yourself.”
For students who are interested in pursuing theater: “Be patient. Don’t rue things that don’t go your way—those are opportunities for something else. A theater career is slow and then fast and then slow again, sometimes for epic stretches. Be kind to yourself and fill yourself up with things that inspire you so that you can digest them and send them back out into the world in new beautiful forms.”
