Jonathan Groff: ‘There’s something about putting on a dress that feels incredibly liberating’

There are times I think this might be the greatest thing I’ve ever been given to do,” says Jonathan Groff, looking for all the world like he means it. This is no small claim, either. The 41-year-old actor has taken on some pretty exceptional parts over the years – leading roles in TV shows like the Netflix serial killer drama Mindhunter and HBO’s soulful gay dramedy Looking (plus a recurring part in Glee); in films by M Night Shyamalan (A Knock at the Cabin) and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix Resurrections); and on stage, in the original Broadway production of Hamilton and a lauded run in 2024’s hit revival of Merrily We Roll Along. But it seems that William Shakespeare may have them all beat.

Groff is sitting in a house in Stratford-upon-Avon, near the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre, where he’s currently fronting an all-male production of the Bard’s As You Like It. He’s wearing a blue baseball cap, which he lifts up as soon as he sees me to reveal a shock of dyed-blonde hair, still wet. “Oh my God, we’re twinning!” he says. (I also have a sort of bedraggled peroxide thing going on, but I fear we are only really twinning in the Schwarzenegger-DeVito sense.)

Stratford seems to suit Groff. He first came here in 2019, shortly after wrapping the second season of Mindhunter, and says he had a “primal experience” watching the RSC’s gender-flipped production of Taming of the Shrew. “I had spent a lot of time filming and doing television, and it just reawakened the theatre animal inside me,” he recalls. Maybe it’s the bucolic Warwickshire scenery – a familiar habitat for Groff, who grew up in the heart of Amish country. “It’s very surreal to see the fields and everything,” Groff says. “When I’m driving around, it feels like I’m back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

The actor is, by his own admission, a “blank slate” when it comes to Shakespeare – in nearly 25 years on stage, Groff has never had to wrap his mouth around these sort of florid iambs. Preparation started nearly a year ago, when he was still in New York, playing Bobby Darin in the musical Just in Time. Every week, he would meet with Daniel Evans, As You Like It’s director, and Patsy Rodenburg, head of the RSC’s vocal coaching, on Zoom. “At first, they would give me sonnets, and I would learn and deliver a sonnet each week, and we would talk about it,” he says. This evolved to soliloquies, and then, finally, the play itself. “We went through line by line, every week. From January to July, it was kind of like a private course on Shakespeare.”

There are other qualities that made As You Like It such an attractive proposition for Groff. He’s playing Rosalind, the lead character – a woman who masquerades as a man. The all-male staging is a throwback to how it would have been cast in Shakespeare’s time, but there is, says Groff, “something in the fabric of the play that lends itself to this sort of all-male production.” It is a play that waltzes across gender boundaries, with “subtle and not-so-subtle homoerotic notes throughout”. Rosalind, Groff’s character, is a woman who disguises herself as a man named Ganymede – a name with a big gay flotilla of connotations to those fluent in Greek mythology. (“Her choice of Ganymede was, you know, synonymous with a young rent boy, essentially.”)

“There’s something unleashing for me in just wearing a dress,” says Groff. “Being a man, playing a woman. It’s returning me back to the freedom of youth I had, when I was six years old, where I would put on dresses and pretend to be women. I haven’t done it as much as an adult – I don’t know why – but when I was a kid, I was always in a dress. And so there’s something about returning here to the countryside and putting on a dress that feels incredibly liberating.”

When he speaks, Groff exudes a sweet, sincere earnestness that falls short of intense; it’s a quality that he carries with him to roles (as the gentle, frustrating twink Patrick in Looking, for instance) as often as not. (As Hamilton’s rebelled-against King George, or The Matrix Resurrections’ Agent Smith, Groff was a picture of smug, malevolent bitchiness.) Maria Friedman, who directed Groff in Merrily two years ago, told me recently that she cast Groff after a six-month process because she wanted someone “who wasn’t a cynical prick. Someone with a big, beating heart, came with joy, and sweetness, and a centre that was good”.

For Groff, it was the “people-pleasingness” of the part that he could really relate to. “In my own psychoanalysis of myself,” he adds. “The shame that I felt growing up gay, and trying to make everybody around me happy, to sort of counteract the fact that I was gay.”

Groff was raised as a Methodist; his father, who came from a family of Mennonites, trained horses for harness racing. He went into acting straight out of high school, touring with a production of The Sound of Music before abandoning university plans and moving to New York. It wasn’t until 2008 that Groff came out as gay to family and friends – he was 23 – and then, the following year, publicly. At the time, his career was still an embryo; he was coming off a stint on the soap opera One Life to Live and a Broadway run in the rock musical Spring Awakening.

“No one ever said to me, ‘Don’t come out, it will affect your career.’ I just felt it,” he says. “I felt like, okay, I’m gonna come out now – there’s people in the theatre that are out, so I know that I’ll still get to be an actor. But maybe I won’t get the audition for the straight male lead in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation, or, you know, to be Captain America or something. And I decided, you know what? I’m okay with that. I just decided I’d rather be myself, and work as I can, then hide something in order to fulfill some idea of a career ambition that I had.”

To some extent, the timing was fortuitous. It was the beginning of the Obama era, “an amazing, progressive wave that I didn’t know was coming.” The roles did arrive – in Ryan Murphy’s fruity TV hit Glee, as the duplicitous teen singer Jesse St James; in Disney’s animated phenomenon Frozen, as Nordic softboi Kristoff, and, in 2014, in the San Francisco-set dramedy Looking.

Characterised – not entirely unfairly – as the gay male community’s answer to Girls, Looking remains one of the most candid, artful, and experientially authentic explorations of contemporary gay life put to screen; for Groff, it was about more than television. “At that time, I had accepted who I was, but I still felt a lot of shame about it. And I mean, it’s still there. Waves of shame come out of nowhere, that you’re like, ‘woah’. And Looking was this ring of fire for me.

“Suddenly all the things I felt insecure or shameful about in my real life were being exorcised, literally, via this character of Patrick,” he continues. “I remember at the first audition feeling like my skin was on fire. I was sweating, I was blushing, it was like, I’m not acting. This feels close to the bone. And so that show ended up being a real release of fear, for me. I got to express all of my fears and insecurities and parts of myself that I was embarrassed by.”

While it quickly grew a small but ardent fanbase, Looking was never a hit in the way that Girls was. Some critics saw its brilliance; others did not. After two seasons, it was cancelled – wrapping things up with a finale film (after Groff personally pleaded with HBO’s boss over lunch). “The reception, and the cancelling, of Looking was painful for us because we were holding our hearts in our hands,” he says. “It didn’t just feel like a TV show. It didn’t just feel like a creative risk – it felt like a personal risk for all of us. We were especially vulnerable.” Now, looking back, he is only thankful.

With Looking and elsewhere, Groff found that coming out “ended up having this surprisingly positive experience for my career – because I started to get these amazing gay parts that became available.” He mentions Knock at the Cabin – the 2023 Shyamalan film in which he plays a gay husband and father faced with what might be the apocalypse – and The Matrix Resurrections, Lana Wachowski’s legacy sequel that saw Groff re-interpret the role once played so iconically by Hugo Weaving.

When it came to Mindhunter, meanwhile – the David Fincher-helmed series in which Groff played an FBI agent specialising in serial killers – Groff’s sexuality couldn’t have mattered less. “David Fincher didn’t give a f*** about who was gay, or who wasn’t gay, but just cast Mindhunter as he wanted,” he says. “I ended up working with people that either liked this aspect [of me], and it meant something to them and were casting me as a gay character, or people that it didn’t mean anything to them either way.”

Groff thinks for a second, and goes on. “It sort of created a clarity of career. I remember thinking, ‘You know what? I don’t want to work with people [for whom] it’s a problem for them if I’m gay. I want to do work that means something to me with people I connect with and respect,” he adds.

“And if that means certain people won’t hire me, or won’t work with me, then I know that I don’t want to work with those people anyway.’”

‘As You Like It’ is at the RSC Stratford until 7 November