“It’s always been my goal to play as many different characters as I can and to challenge myself,” says actor Nicholas Christopher. It’s a dream plenty of actors in the theater certainly share — but few get to realize it as completely as Christopher has in his still-evolving career.
Since making his Broadway debut in 2013 in the ensemble of Motown: The Musical (he was later promoted to playing Smokey Robinson in the show’s national tour), Christopher’s roles have ranged from the comic to the ultra-dramatic, straddling vocal parts and eras of musical theater.
Now, Christopher is taking on his biggest starring role on Broadway yet, as the tormented Russian competitor Anatoly in Chess, which just earned him his first Tony Award nomination, for best actor in a musical. Playing such an internal character in the musical written by Tim Rice and ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus — albeit one who sings the beloved, immense showpieces “Where I Want to Be” and “Anthem” — was a challenge for Christopher.
“I have to trust that what I’m feeling on the inside will be felt by the audience, until it bursts in Act 2,” he says of Anatoly, who portrays an outward stoicism even as he’s torn apart inside by the political pressure his country exerts on him, his sense of obligation to a wife and children he’s left behind, and the pull of a new romantic relationship.
But for Christopher, it’s a role that many others over the years have prepared him for. “I feel like I’ve lived a lot of lives — whether it was growing up in Bermuda and then moving to Boston, playing sports, being biracial,” he says. “There are so many different parts of myself I want to explore. I look forward to both surprising myself and surprising audience members with what I do next.”
He spoke to Billboard about what he learned through the major roles he’s played on the road to becoming Anatoly.
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George Washington in Hamilton (starting in 2016)
Image Credit: Joan Marcus Christopher was among the earliest group of actors Lin-Manuel Miranda included in his groundbreaking hip-hop musical’s development. After the show opened on Broadway, around the 2016 Tony Awards season, he began officially understudying original George Washington Chris Jackson and original Aaron Burr Leslie Odom Jr. He might have played Burr in the show’s opening Chicago cast, but Miss Saigon came along; in between the two, he took over the role of Washington. “When you’re playing an authority figure on stage, you have to feel that, but I was like, maybe 26 years old playing this part with all these people who had just skyrocketed into stardom,” Christopher recalls. “The biggest challenge was just standing in my own [power]. I learned a lot about pretending to be a leader by playing one on stage.”
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John in Miss Saigon (starting in 2017)
Playing the character of Vietnam veteran John, who sings the anthemic second-act highlight “Bui-Doi,” was Christopher’s first time opening a show in a principal role. “I’ve been fortunate to play these parts that have big solo moments like ‘Anthem’ [in Chess]. In the Rent off-Broadway revival, I originated Collins and it was the ‘I’ll Cover You (Reprise),’ and in Miss Saigon it was ‘Bui-Doi,’” he says. “You just ride the wave of the story and allow the emotion of the moment to carry you through. I think at first you feel that pressure [of the big song], but once you get in rehearsal and create the character, that really melts away.”
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Pirelli and Sweeney in Sweeney Todd (2023 and 2024, respectively)
Donning a ridiculous wig (and Italian accent) as snake-oil salesman Pirelli — a transformation so complete that, he says, his friend Billy Porter didn’t even recognize him the night he saw the show — was “so freeing,” Christopher says; in fact, his adroitness with the accent was what convinced Chess director Michael Mayer he might be able to handle Anatoly’s Russian one. Playing the musical’s titular “demon barber” for a short time after original star Josh Groban left the role was another thing entirely. “It totally helped me with Anatoly, even the way the sound resonates in my body,” Christopher says. “I don’t think I’d sung that way on Broadway before. Having gone through that has really helped me with the vocal longevity I need for Anatoly.”
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Jelly Roll Morton in Jelly’s Last Jam (2024)
Image Credit: Joan Marcus Christopher did not expect to book the title role that made a theater legend of dancer-actor Gregory Hines — and when he did, he had to juggle immersive tap lessons (and just two weeks of overall prep, as is customary with the semi-staged productions at New York City Center’s Encores! series, of which this was a part) with being Broadway’s interim Sweeney Todd after Josh Groban left the role. Playing Jelly — a man “who believes he created a genre of music that is so Black, [who] grapples with his own Blackness, and because of his own childhood wounds ashes out at the people he loves the most” — was certainly quite different from Anatoly in Chess. But both characters contend with the idea of legacy, “this fear of being forgotten,” as Christopher puts it. As a dad of two young girls, “I was really starting to think about legacy: when they grow up, will there be tangible evidence that I was here? I kept thinking I need to leave something behind.”
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Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors (2025)
Image Credit: Emilio Madrid Casting the 6-foot-2, at the time roughly 210-pound actor as the nerdy introvert in this ongoing, major off-Broadway production was Chess (and Little Shop) director Michael Mayer’s first big gamble on Christopher, who assumed he’d more likely be cast as Audrey II, the bellowing carnivorous plant. “I lost like 40 pounds when I opened it. I really tried to make myself as small as possible,” Christopher recalls. “And that was just a blast. A person who lets their rage simmer in them but also is like, ‘Don’t look at me, I’m not worthy’ — it was interesting to have a similar motive to Sweeney but have their actions be very different.”
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