New York – One of the most difficult things to appear on Broadway may not be the performance or hours. He is pressing his curriculum less than 100 words for his biography in Playbill. Tr Knight tried to include everything, initially.
“I was angry with myself for getting beautiful about what to include and what not to include,” he says. “I thought, ‘You’re being ridiculous.”
Then, instead of trying to fit into a race that has covered Shakespeare and “Gray Anatomy” to David Mamet play and ” The hostess, “Knight changed direction.
“Once there was an actor named Knight,” reads his Playbill propaganda. “Who knew his left stage of the right stage/went to do some television/but now he is happy to be/back in front of the bright standing lights.”
What has attracted him to Broadway is the amazing prequel of the successful Netflix program “Stranger Things”, a work of levitating cats, shattered mirrors and showgirls of Las Vegas.
Located in Hawkins, Indiana, 20 years before the events of the first season, “More strange things: the first shadow” It focuses on the creation of a monster, the villain Vecna, played by Louis McCartney. Knight portrays his father.
They introduce us to a shy and uncomfortable teenager Henry Creel, who will later be a neighborhood, while he moves to Hawkins and goes to high school. It has many strange powers and concerns.
His father is not in a great place, suffering from PTSD and drinking too much. “I think he wants to be a good husband and a good father, and I think he knows he is failing both,” says Knight. “You don’t have the tools to stop it.”
Knight was a fan of “Stranger Things” even before joining the work, waiting every season. He was asked to audition for a different character, but he was attracted to the father after reading the script.
“Although our damage is different, I felt that I understood that damage in a way that I did not understand this other character,” he says. “I simply felt that it was strong enough in my entrails so that it could be a better combination.”
The co -director “Stranger Things: The First Shadow”, Justin Martin, says that Knight is constantly changing his focus and always surprising, calling him a “Renaissance man in terms of his performance”
“It’s always about work. He is very interested in very, very different characters and different styles of action. And that’s why he is constantly pressed. Every time he makes the scene is slightly different,” says Martin. “He goes, ‘What else can I find? What else could undermine?’ I love in an actor. “
The work of “Stranger Things” was also attractive to Knight due to its director: Stephen Daldry, the three -time winner of the Tony Award he directed “Billy Elliot: The musical.”
Knight remembers being impressed by the way Daldry told the story without the sentimentality of an 11 -year -old boy who just wants to dance.
“The way he could distill that in such a brutally beautiful and honest way he left me, when I left that theater, I remember being empty and full at the same time if that is possible.”
Knight and her husband have returned to the New York area after years in Los Angeles, wanting to do more theater, something that he calls “home.”
“He is still so challenging, still immensely challenging, madly challenging for me, theater, but I love it,” he says. “I missed it.”
Knight grew in Minneapolis and spent two years at the scarce Guthrie theater in the city before moving to New York at 25. He became a family name in the successful medical drama of ABC “Gray’s Anatomy”, which he left after five seasons.
He feels that a new chapter opens, one with confidence and maturity. The movement coincides with a change in its creative work and its life.
“It’s an exciting moment and maybe it is a time when I can let many of the nonsense that may have worried me, maybe? Do you like the way I said, perhaps worried in the past? The nonsense has affected me.”
