Andrew Rannells, the Broadway leading man who is done being the sassy gay friend

Andrew Rannells

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 23, 1978 Omaha, Nebraska, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Intern, A Simple Favor, Why Him?
Awards	Grammy

Andrew Rannells keeps a stock reply for the scripts that still arrive with the same character inside them. “I can’t be the sassy gay friend forever, folks,” he told the culture pages of India’s The Telegraph this spring. “The sass will wear away at some point!” It was a joke, and also a fair summary of his screen career. The man who created Elder Price in The Book of Mormon, a leading role that asks for a tenor’s top notes and a golden boy’s self-regard, spent years on television as the sharpest person in somebody else’s story. The parts he has taken lately pull the other way.

He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of five children of Charlotte and Ronald Rannells, and was eleven when he acted in his first play. A local casting call for the animation company DIC Entertainment, answered while he was still a teenager, gave him something rare for a kid in the Midwest: paid work as a voice actor. At Creighton Preparatory School, an all-boys Catholic school, he kept quiet about being gay. He came out to his family at eighteen; nobody, he said, was surprised.

He moved to New York after graduating in 1997, still a teenager (he was born on August 23, 1978), studied theater at Marymount Manhattan College for two years and then quit to audition full time. The early New York years were spent largely in dubbing booths, voicing characters in the English versions of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! for 4Kids Entertainment. He also toured as James in Pokémon Live!, a job his first memoir recalls as a paycheck he needed and a caricature of a gay man he hated.

Broadway let him in through the side door. He made his debut in Hairspray in 2005, first as an understudy and then as Link Larkin, and went on to play Bob Gaudio in Jersey Boys, on tour and then on Broadway from January 2009. “I started my career as a replacement, as an understudy,” he told NPR this year. “I was not accustomed to the idea that I could call out of a show.”

Then came The Book of Mormon, the 2011 musical by Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez, in which he originated Elder Kevin Price opposite Josh Gad’s Elder Cunningham. His big solo, “I Believe,” is still the song people ask him to sing. The role brought a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical, which he did not win, and a Grammy for the original cast recording, which he did. The show’s irreverence never worried him: “I heard the humor in it and I felt very confident that people were going to think it was funny.”

Hollywood moved quickly, and not always kindly. He and Gad each landed an NBC sitcom: Rannells starred as Bryan Collins in The New Normal, Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler’s comedy about a gay couple and the woman carrying their child, while Gad had 1600 Penn. “They both aired the same week,” Rannells recalled. “They were both canceled.” What lasted was Girls. As Elijah, the college boyfriend who comes out and becomes the closest thing Lena Dunham‘s heroine has to a confidant, he could deflate any of her monologues with a single line, and that performance became the template casting directors kept copying.

The following decade was steady and mostly supporting. He played the ambitious young trader Blair Pfaff opposite Don Cheadle for three seasons of Showtime’s Black Monday, which he also produced. He voiced Matthew MacDell, the acid-tongued teenager of Netflix‘s Big Mouth, and William Clockwell, the hero’s best friend in Amazon‘s Invincible, and turned up as an out-of-work actor in Netflix’s The Prom.

The stage kept offering him the weight that television did not. As Whizzer in the 2016 Broadway revival of Falsettos, directed by James Lapine, he played the man whose illness in the first years of AIDS gives the musical its grief, and earned a second Tony nomination, as featured actor. He was Larry in the 50th-anniversary revival of The Boys in the Band in 2018 and again in the Netflix film of 2020. He also wrote two memoirs, Too Much Is Not Enough and Uncle of the Year, and directed an episode of Amazon’s Modern Love based on one of his essays.

There is a gap in this career. His stage parts are men with appetites and contradictions; his best-known screen parts are friends, exes and colleagues who exist to react to the lead. Some of that comes from the industry’s habit of filing an openly gay comic actor under one heading. Some of it comes from a performer willing to walk away from prestige when the terms are wrong. In London he originated the televangelist Jim Bakker in Tammy Faye, Elton John’s musical at the Almeida Theatre, and was nominated for an Olivier Award. When the show headed to Broadway in 2024 he was announced for the transfer, then left after contract negotiations failed, and his Falsettos co-star Christian Borle took the part. The sidekick label is not of his own making, though stepping away from the biggest lead he had been offered in years did nothing to shake it.

The last two years read like a deliberate correction. He reunited with Dunham in Netflix’s Too Much in 2025 as Jameson, the husband who leaves her heroine to explore non-monogamy with a couple. In the second season of Hulu’s Deli Boys, released in May, he was Andrew Chadwater, a Philadelphia district attorney who hopes to ride a family drug empire’s downfall into the mayor’s office. “The larger headline of who he is is that he is a corrupt jerk,” he said. Hulu canceled the series in August. In Miss You, Love You, written and directed by Jim Rash for HBO, he plays Jamie Simms, the “assistant” of Allison Janney‘s estranged son, left to plan a funeral with the widow. The film was nominated for the Emmy for outstanding television movie, and Rannells ranks Jamie with Elder Price and Elijah as his three best roles.

In June, for the 15th anniversary of The Book of Mormon, he and Gad took the stage as missionaries again at the Tony Awards. The voice had held; the body, he admitted, was another matter: “I can’t dance as much as I used to.” His next role needs neither the sass nor the choreography. From November 4 he plays George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at the Broadhurst Theatre, directed by Jerry Zaks, opposite Megan Hilty’s Mary. It opens on November 18 and runs until January 3. George Bailey is nobody’s sidekick.

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Tags: actors, Allison Janney, Lena Dunham, Andrew Rannells, The Book of Mormon, Deli Boys

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