True to Character

Posted on Sept. 14, 2017

When Max von Essen ’96 was growing up on Long Island, N.Y., he sometimes was bullied for his interest in music and acting.

“I know how sad I was growing up, and when I see someone sad or confused like that, I can respond,” von Essen says. The Broadway actor’s path has led to a Tony nomination, and his empathy for young people who are struggling for acceptance means he sometimes gets letters at the stage door or an email about their struggles. He replies to each one.

“I don’t try to work my way into their personal business, but I’ll write simple uplifting lines, telling them, ‘You’ve got this,’ ‘Don’t stop fighting’ and ‘You can get through this, I did.’”

Von Essen’s 2015 Tony nomination for featured actor in a musical was for his role in An American in Paris as Henri Baurel, a Parisian cabaret dancer with a closeted sexual identity. That accolade came about a decade after von Essen decided to be more open about being gay and his own struggles with identity.

“I had this epiphany in my life where I realized it was more than just being a working actor — I had to be fully truthful, fully open with who I am,” he said. “I felt like I would be irresponsible to not be fully and publicly who I am, so that if there is some young person out there struggling, they have people to look toward and see that there is room out there for them as well.”

At the most human level

“We always hear about the triple threat, but Max is a quadruple threat,” said Terry Rhodes ’78, UNC’s senior associate dean for fine arts and humanities, who introduced her former student at the New York Carolina Club’s annual arts brunch. “Because he’s not only an actor, a dancer and a singer, but he has a deep intelligence and curiosity and a willingness to explore the art and go beyond.”

Von Essen says that at Carolina he was free to delve into the arts — he helped found the acting group Company Carolina — and embrace his sexual identity.

“UNC became more than just a place for me to go to school, it became a place for me to really start my life,” he said. “After all those years of pretending I was someone else, my life immediately changed. Because if you don’t know who you are at the most human level — something that other people are born never questioning — then that’s really a profound moment when you find a place where you feel that you can be you and life really does fully start at that point.”

His ‘two-year experiment’

Chatting in a cafe in New York’s Theater District, von Essen said that he had majored in economics as well as vocal performance and planned to work on Wall Street. “I’d always thought I’d get a traditional, safer job.”

But a few months before graduation, he decided to bypass banking for musical theater, in what he called his “two-year experiment” to see whether he could make it in show business.

He moved back to New York, sleeping on his parents’ couch between extended musical tours. His first gig came weeks after graduation as a featured singer on a live pre-show performance for Disney’s 101 Dalmatians at Radio City Music Hall. Soon after, he was touring with Liza Minnelli as a backup singer and traveling Europe as Tony in West Side Story.

For his first gig on Broadway, he joined the ensemble and understudied the role of Jesus in the 2000 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar. The second week of previews, Jesus got sick, and von Essen got the call to step in.

He alerted his parents so they could get tickets to see his performance and began a grueling day. “It was noon, and I didn’t know an ounce of the show,” he recalled. “No blocking, no choreography. I hadn’t even been able to watch the show because I was in the ensemble. So they rehearsed me all day until 7 p.m.”

An hour later, he walked onto the stage as Jesus. He walked off feeling like a star.

“The beginning of the show, Jesus descends from a huge bridge as the theme music plays and all this light shoots on the audience,” he said. “And you’re just up there shaking, and you can’t believe you’re about to play Jesus. And the show flies by, and at the end they’re sponging you down and cleaning you off for the curtain call, because you’re covered in all this blood, and then you take your final bow on a Broadway stage — something you’ve dreamed of doing your entire childhood — and suddenly, even if it’s just for that one night, you’re the star, and everything changes.”

Circling back

Von Essen kept performing, on TV as well as stage. By the time his two-year deadline had passed, he’d almost forgotten about it. But he says his performance in An American in Paris brought his career full circle.

The production is filled with the music of George Gershwin, the composer who inspired von Essen’s early childhood piano playing (his old dog-eared practice book, Gershwin on Broadway, still has a place on his Schumann baby grand in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment).

He reached out to fans through an eight-part video blog on Broadway.com, taking them behind the scenes. And, identifying with the role of Henri Baurel, von Essen concluded the series with an unplanned monologue, assuring them that confusion about identity and the future is natural: “I understand you, and I want to meet you one day, and I want to see you perform, and I want to see you at the stage door, and I want to see you have an amazing life, even if it feels like right now it might not be amazing.”

— Emily Palmer ’14

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