Cole Escola, the Tony winner who keeps handing their Mary Todd Lincoln to other stars

Cole Escola

Photo: The Tony Awards / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 25, 1986 Clatskanie, Oregon, United States
Occupation	Actor and Playwright
Awards	Tony Award · Laurence Olivier · Pulitzer Prize

Most writers who create a career-defining role hold on to it. Cole Escola keeps giving theirs away. The Mary Todd Lincoln of Oh, Mary!, a whiskey-hunting First Lady who wants nothing from the White House except a way back to the cabaret stage, has been played on Broadway by Betty Gilpin, Tituss Burgess, Jinkx Monsoon, Jane Krakowski, John Cameron Mitchell, Maya Rudolph and Bowen Yang, while a touring company carries her across the United States and a London cast rotates through the Trafalgar Theatre. Escola steps back into the part when they choose to, and the play survives every substitution. That is the strange achievement at the center of their story: a performer who spent years being treated as too specific for anyone else’s material wrote a role specific enough that every comic star now wants to borrow it.

The specificity came from somewhere hard. Escola grew up in Clatskanie, a small town on the Oregon bank of the Columbia River, in a family of Finnish and Norwegian descent. When they were six, their father chased the family out of their mobile home with a gun, and Escola, their mother and their brother went on to live in government housing. Theater arrived through community productions and school stages, where Escola appeared in Fiddler on the Roof, Les Misérables and Little Shop of Horrors. After finishing at R. A. Long High School, they moved to New York to study humanities at Marymount Manhattan College and left after a single year.

What followed was less a training program than a survival plan. Escola, born on November 25, 1986, was not yet twenty on arriving in the city, and performed at children’s birthday parties, worked at the Scholastic bookstore and at a vegan bakery, and found their real classroom in the downtown cabaret circuit. They became a regular guest in the Our Hit Parade series, built monthly solo shows at the Duplex Cabaret Theatre, played an unborn fetus in Bridget Everett‘s Rock Bottom at Joe’s Pub, and later premiered Help! I’m Stuck, an hour-long solo show that kept selling out the same room. The audiences were small and knew exactly what they had come for. Escola learned to hold a crowd that could leave at any moment and had no reason to be polite.

The first wider audience came through a partnership. In 2008 Escola met the comedian Jeffery Self, and the two began posting surreal, half-scripted YouTube sketches in which Escola usually played the unhinged foil to Self’s straight man. The videos drew enough attention for New York magazine to cover them and for Logo TV to commission Jeffery & Cole Casserole, which premiered in June 2009, ran for two seasons and settled into cult status. Self never left the picture: years later, accepting a Tony, Escola singled him out among the friends who had come to share the night.

Television followed in supporting parts that kept proving the same point. Julie Klausner wrote the role of Matthew in Hulu’s Difficult People with Escola in mind, and they played him from 2015 to 2017. On At Home with Amy Sedaris they were Chassie Tucker, the host’s neighbor; there were recurring turns in Mozart in the Jungle and Girlboss; and in Search Party their character Chip, introduced as a side figure, became a series regular in the final season on HBO Max. Voice work multiplied, from a gargoyle in What We Do in the Shadows to Montel in the Netflix animated series Human Resources and Gopher in Frog and Toad. On film there were parts in Wild Nights with Emily and Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please, and a voice role in Julian Glander’s animated Boys Go to Jupiter.

The honest reading of those years is less flattering to the industry than to Escola. Casting departments understood that they were funny; few understood what to build around them. The parts were written as accents, the oddball neighbor or the queer friend who livens a scene and then leaves it, and Escola was often the most alive presence on screen in a role that offered no second act. There is a harder truth on the other side of the ledger. Escola has never been a performer for everyone. The comedy depends on total commitment to absurd premises, on camp delivered with complete sincerity, on a taste for the grotesque that television kept trimming to fit its formats. Oh, Mary! did not soften any of that. It is a farce with no interest in historical accuracy: it makes Abraham Lincoln a closeted husband and Mary his eventual assassin. Its success did not prove that Escola had become more palatable. It proved that an audience had been waiting for exactly that sensibility at full strength.

The idea that changed everything sat unused for years. In 2009 Escola sent themselves an email with a single question: what if Abraham Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd? They avoided writing it for a long time. “There are certain ideas that you’re just like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to plant this seed, because what if it’s an ugly flower?'” they told Salon. When the play finally arrived, it was an eighty-minute farce about a First Lady who drinks, schemes and longs for cabaret, married to a president with secrets of his own and surrounded by a long-suffering chaperone, an anxious assistant and an acting teacher who complicates everything.

Directed by Sam Pinkleton, Oh, Mary! opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in February 2024, extended twice and transferred to the Lyceum Theatre, where it opened on Broadway on July 11, 2024. It marked Escola’s Broadway debut as both writer and performer. The Outer Critics Circle gave them the John Gassner Award, Time placed them on its Time 100 Next list that October, and the play was named a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. At the 2025 Tony Awards the production had five nominations and won two: Best Direction of a Play for Pinkleton and Best Actor in a Play for Escola, who prevailed over a field that included George Clooney and became the first openly non-binary performer to win in that category. Escola opened the speech by pointing out that Julie Harris already had a Tony for playing Mary Todd Lincoln, and found room for a message home: “Hi, Mom. I love you. I’ll call you when I can.”

By then the giving away had already begun. Betty Gilpin took over the role in early 2025, Tituss Burgess covered two separate stints, and Escola rejoined the company in April 2025 in time for the awards season. The rotation since has turned the Lyceum into a kind of open audition for comic stars: Jinkx Monsoon across two runs, Jane Krakowski, John Cameron Mitchell, Maya Rudolph, Megan Stalter and, since September 15, 2026, Bowen Yang in his Broadway acting debut, now extended through January 17, 2027. The play has proved sturdy enough to fit each of them, which is the best evidence that Escola built a structure and not merely a vehicle for their own timing.

London followed the same pattern. The West End production began performances at the Trafalgar Theatre in December 2025 with Mason Alexander Park as Mary, and in 2026 it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play before Escola had played the role there. Catherine Tate took over in the spring, Park briefly returned, and Escola finally made their West End debut in a four-week engagement from July 20 to August 15, 2026. Jinkx Monsoon and then Lolly Adefope followed; Adefope is scheduled to play Mary in London through December 5.

The London stint carried a second purpose. On July 28, 2026, the production was filmed live at the Trafalgar with Escola as Mary, Giles Terera as her husband, Michael Urie as her teacher, Bianca Leigh as her chaperone and Tony Macht as the assistant. HBO has announced that the capture will premiere on HBO and stream on HBO Max in 2027, which means the version of Mary most viewers will eventually see is the one played by the person who wrote her. In the United States, a national tour opened at The Bushnell in Hartford, Connecticut, on September 19, 2026, with the drag artist Alaska as Mary through January 17, 2027; after that, J. Harrison Ghee, who starts the tour as Mary’s husband, takes over the title role.

Screen work is catching up with the stage. Escola has been cast as Bon Clay, the flamboyant assassin also known as Mr. 2, in the third season of Netflix’s live-action One Piece, a character the production has reimagined as non-binary; the season went into production in Cape Town. They voice Levi, the right-hand elf to Melissa McCarthy’s title character, in Warner Bros. Pictures Animation’s holiday musical Margie Claus, scheduled for November 2027. They are also writing a feature film about Miss Piggy for Disney, with Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence producing; Lawrence revealed the project on the podcast Las Culturistas in November 2025 and warned that the tone would be darker than a typical Muppets outing.

Escola came out as non-binary in 2021 and uses they/them pronouns. They have spoken openly about the lean New York years and the jobs that kept them afloat, and the public profile has widened along with the work: in early October 2026 they were in Paris for Loewe’s spring-summer 2027 show, a long way from the Duplex.

The next stretch of this career will be measured in other people’s performances almost as much as in Escola’s own. Bowen Yang is on the Lyceum stage, Alaska is on the road, Adefope holds London, and the filmed version waits for its HBO date. The question that hung over Escola for so long, whether anyone would write something big enough for them, has been answered in the most Escola way possible: they wrote it themselves, and then let everyone else try it on.

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