Will Brill Won a Tony and Got His First Leading Film Role, but That’s Not How He Measures Success

It’s all glamorous — chatting Tony wins and snagging leading roles in movies and sterling New York Times reviews — until your cat needs something. Fortunately, actor Will Brill knows a thing or two about balance, and managed to both a) charmingly answer our many varied queries about his wide-ranging career and b) attend to his yowling tabby’s needs while doing so. Brill is one of those actors you know, even if you don’t know him by name. One of the “oh, I love that guy!” kind of performers. The kind of performer who shows up and instantly makes things better, or brighter, or somehow richer. His credits are wide and deep — movies like “Caught Stealing” and “Test Pattern,” shows like “The OA” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” theater like “Oklahoma” and “Stereophonic” — and things are only picking up for him. In 2024, Brill won his first Tony for the beloved rock musical “Stereophonic,” snagging Best Featured Actor in a Play in a field that included two of his own co-stars. In 2025, he got his first leading role in the film, care of Giselle Bonilla’s darkly hilarious “The Musical.” Not too shabby, right? It gets better. When Brill spoke with IndieWire, reviews were just hitting for the limited run of “Kramer/Fauci” at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Daniel Fish’s lauded play previously ran at the Skirball earlier this year and, this fall, Brill reprised his role as, yes, that Dr. Anthony Fauci. The creative, thrilling play dramatizes a 1993 C-SPAN call-in show, during which Fauci (then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and Larry Kramer (the famously outspoken playwright and activist) went at each other over the plans for a new government task force on H.I.V. and AIDS. “I’m one of those weirdos who will read [reviews],” Brill said with a laugh when asked if he’d been keeping up with the glowing criticism for the show. “I read every single review. I’ve read every review of ‘The Musical’ on Letterboxd. Some would say I’m a glutton for punishment.” Helen Shaw’s review in the New York Times, he agreed, was not punishment. “I felt auspicious because I knew that Helen Shaw had seen it at Skirball and really enjoyed it,” he said. “But, even so, to say, ‘The most beautiful play I’ve seen all year and I would happily see it 10 more times’ is crazy. I mean, it’s so cool.” Brill has been doing live theater as long as he’s been acting, getting his start in children’s theater when he was still just a kid in the Bay Area. Process is compelling to him, and he lights up when asked about something as workaday as what he does during the hours between demanding shows. “It depends on the show a lot, the difference between this show and ‘Stereophonic,’ for instance, is that Stereophonic was a three-hour, 15-minute show where I was screaming and crying most of the times that I was on stage, and this show is an hour long and I never have to raise my voice,” Brill said. “I get to lie down for part of it! Also, for ‘Stereophonic,’ we were in Midtown Manhattan, and for this, I’m in Dumbo, so I get to go outside and sit by the river and read my book, which is dreamy. And then during ‘Stereophonic,’—” That’s when Curtis the tabby really gets going. “Sorry, my cat is really going through it. Can you hear him?,” Brill said, before darting off-screen to retrieve and present a gorgeous and giant striped feline. “This is Curtis. What is it, baby? He’s screaming. He’s been walking around screaming his head off. Oh, I wonder … I have a robot litter box now and it looks like it is… Sorry, this is such a chaotic morning for me. I think it just needs a reset. Maybe that’s what’s going on with him.” Alex Heller, Rob Lowe, Giselle Bonilla, Gillian Jacobs, and Will Brill at the IndieWire Studio Presented by Dropbox at Sundance on January 24, 2026 in Park City, UtahTiffany Burke Yowling cats will keep anyone grounded. In a weird way, so will Tony wins. I asked Brill what changed — or didn’t — after he won his first. “I think less changed than I sort of expected it would,” he said. “There’s all kinds of legends about what people go through, what changes for people. Oh, my gosh, people love to say, ‘Oh, I thought my entire career was going to change and then I didn’t work for three years.’ And that was certainly not the case for me, but I did have to make a pretty difficult choice about whether or not I was going to go do the show again in London, which I ultimately decided not to do. I had a year where I made less money than I would have, but I did some really rewarding and very challenging things. I starred in a movie for the first time. I had never done that before, so that was really exciting and new and different.” Bonilla’s feature debut “The Musical” debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was recently released in theaters and on VOD. It’s a tricky film to explain — it has a twist, sort of, but really just a devilish sense of humor — and Brill loved that. He stars as middle school drama teacher Doug Leibowitz, recently dumped his girlfriend, consumed by his failures as a playwright, and perhaps in the exact right mental headspace to put on an, ahem, shocking new musical. “I wish I could remember when exactly it dawned on me in the script, because definitely it took me by surprise and it was at that moment where I thought, ‘Oh, I have to do this. There’s no question about this. This is my role,’” he said when asked about the moment he realized what the film was doing with its central musical conceit. “Because it was so exciting and so unlike anything else that I had read. Giselle and I would sneak in to screenings to hear the audience realize what’s happening and listen to them respond to it, and it’s always terribly gratifying.” ‘The Musical’Tu Do We won’t spoil the film here, but suffice to say, Doug and his merry band of middle schoolers put on a show that is based on perhaps the last event you’d ever expect to inspire a musical. The first time Brill saw the film with an audience who had no idea what they were in for, he realized going in cold might be the move. “I realized that really the best way to experience the movie is with other people not knowing what is coming, because the shock is so crazy,” he said. “And something about the way that it has been finagled is that you are pulled in so many directions, between wanting Doug to fail, but also wanting the children to succeed. It’s such a torrent of things happening that it’s really sort of best to experience with a bunch of other people at the same time.” The role might have been Brill’s first leading one on the big screen, but he’s no stranger to tough material — or the weight of it. In 2019, he starred alongside Brittany S. Hall in Shatara Michelle Ford’s staggering debut feature, “Test Pattern.” The film follows couple Renesha (Hall) and Evan (Brill) as they navigate a horrific sexual assault and a system not at all equipped to handling survivors with grace. “They share more DNA than you would think,” he said of Bonilla’s film and Ford’s. “‘Test Pattern’ was the biggest emotional undertaking that I’d ever taken on film before. I was being trusted with a lot by Shatara. They were also a first-time filmmaker, so there was a lot of trust that we were giving to each other, and that was very palpable from the first time we met each other, that we were embarking on something that was pretty untrod territory for both of us and maybe in the landscape of cinema. We both felt tremendous responsibility. We both took it very, very seriously and were asking a lot of ourselves and each other.” ‘Test Pattern’©Kino International/Courtesy Everett Collection Ford’s film was made “on a shoestring budget” with “absolutely no amenities of any kind,” the actor added. “But that said, it was really rewarding, and everybody showed up really desperate to do well every day,” he said. “Similarly, on ‘The Musical,’ I’m on camera in almost every scene of the movie, so I felt a lot of pressure at the time. I knew that a lot of the success of the thing relied on me, and usually, at least in my career, that’s not been the case. I’ve played a lot of supporting roles, and I know that I can show up for a scene and deliver something special and ultimately get to walk away and say, ‘This thing does not live or die on my performance alone.’ I couldn’t write that off with either of the two movies.” Brill has also dipped into studio features, including a small but memorable role in Darren Aronofsky’s 2025 crime dramedy “Caught Stealing,” in which he plays a homeless man who offers a surprising key to a complicated story. “Those experiences are wild, because you walk onyo the set and it’s you and Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz and Darren Aronofsky,” he said. “And you’re just sort of like, ‘OK…’ It’s a lot of pressure, and it’s a lot of excitement. ‘Test Pattern’ had a crew of 20 people on any given day, and then there were 100 or more people on the set of ‘Caught Stealing’ every time I was there. We were shutting down blocks of New York City traffic for hours in the middle of the night. It was really wild.” The role might have been firmly supporting, but the experience really stuck with him. “I had two very big votes of confidence while I was working on that movie that I felt really cool about,” the actor said. “One was that when pedestrians got hustled by. on more than one occasion, people were like, ‘Why aren’t they moving this homeless man who’s on the street?’ People had to be like ‘He’s an actor.’ So that felt really good. I got sort of nervous that I was going to be there in the presence of this auteur who was going to be self-serious and formidable and difficult, and Darren was everything you want a director to be. He was so game, he was so fun. He was appreciating the magic of every moment, and he was so supportive of his actors. Every time I did a take, he was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so much fun. I wish we had you for longer.’ It’s very cool to show up to the big game and have it be as cool as you want it to be.” Brill will round out this year with another supporting turn in a big film. In Sian Heder’s crowd-pleasing biopic “Being Heumann,” he plays Gene Eidenberg, a real-life political adviser who kind of takes the heat when Mark Ruffalo’s Joseph A. Califano Jr. (the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare) won’t give much leeway to disability rights activist Judy Heumann and her compatriots during a historic sit-in. “Sian’s take on the world is so cool, because she has such a good heart and is so funny and fun. The way she sees the world is so filled with light and joy, even when she’s taking on pretty heavy topics,” he said. “I don’t know that I have laughed that much on a set. I can’t remember the last time I did. Sian is so funny and fun, and so is Mark, and so is Dylan [O’Brien]. It was such a joy.” D’Arcee Neal, Antwan Tolliver, Charlie Rush-Reese, Rein Barcel, Roberta Colindrez, Jon Beavers, Matthew August Jeffers, Will Brill, Sian Heder, Ruth Madeley, Dylan O’Brien, Ray Fisher, Rio Finnegan, Daniel Durant, Siena Rafter, Andrew Pilkington, Madeline Delp and Russell Harvard at the ‘Being Heumann‘ premiere at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2026 in Toronto, Ontario, CanadaDeadline via Getty Images Heder’s film is remarkable for the way it built actual access into its story about the need for more equitable access for all. Even as an able-bodied actor playing an able-bodied role, Brill felt the power of that. “I think when the culture is about ‘let’s take care of people and meet needs,’ the work can thrive more,” he said. “I think the camaraderie amongst actors becomes very different. It becomes a lot tighter. There were these group green rooms and dressing rooms that you sort of never get. We had these lounges where we were hanging out and we were able to dissect the day, and that was really lovely. I mean, as with any movie, I think it was still really difficult at times and there are these monumental learning curves, but that’s part of the joy of filmmaking too, is that every single project is a new project. You never stop learning how to make a movie.” And Brill knows about all kinds of projects. This is the kind of actor who pops up everywhere. A quick glance at his IMDb page is filled with delights — like the year 2017, when he appeared in not only an episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” but also “NCIS: New Orleans.” He laughed when I mentioned that double whammy. “What was really cool was that I couldn’t have played more different characters,” he said. “I was like a coke dealer who lived in Soho in ‘SVU,’ and in ‘NCIS,’ I was a spirit medium who thought that he was a con artist, but then started actually communing with spirits. ‘NCIS: New Orleans,’ I filmed four days and was in New Orleans for three weeks, so I just had all this free time to explore New Orleans for the first time. It was incredible.” Brill, it seems, finds value — of all kinds — in every project and part. So, is there some sort of magic balance he wants to strike with his choices? Is there a way to plot this kind of trajectory? “It’s really tough to say, because there’s no continuity, it always changes,” Brill said. “But I have been lucky enough to really find a family in theater in New York, and so I do feel like it is there for me on some level. There are definitely things that I really want to do. There are challenges that I want to give myself, and I would say that the most open plane for that right now is television. I really want to find out what it’s like to play a character who lives and changes over a decade. I’m desperate for that experience.” He’d like to be able to do that and still do theater. He added, “I see my friends who are on television shows and are navigating doing theater in their off time. Michael Urie is a huge inspiration in that because he’s such a theater creature, but he’s always been on TV too. So that’s a thing that I think about a lot, is the balance.” But what he ultimately wants is something a bit harder to pin down, a balance that goes beyond designations like “film” or “TV show” or “theater,” the kind of spot that values experience in all its shapes. And, yes, probably the kind of space in which spending time with his cat is just as rewarding as a varied resume and making stuff with friends. “I feel like life is long and I’m here for the challenge, and I’m going to get to do all of it. I’m just biding my time,” Brill said. “I feel like nowhere more than in this industry does the aphorism apply of ‘if you want to make God laugh, make plans.’ I’m down to ride the wave and let things come as they come. The most rewarded and fulfilled I’ve ever felt in this industry are the projects that are born out of tight-knit groups of friends or where tight-knit friendships are made, because what we do is storytelling, and storytelling is about creating and solidifying community. I think the thing that I will always keep wanting to do is telling stories with close friends, whatever the medium is. That’s the thing I want to do most.” Apple will release “Being Heumann” in select theaters on Friday, November 6 and on Apple TV on Friday, November 13. A Blue Harbor Entertainment and Variance Films release, “The Musical” is currently available to rent or buy digitally on major streaming and VOD storefronts.