Jordan Fisher, the performer who keeps rewriting who gets to be the lead

Jordan Fisher

Photo: Zafer / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 24, 1994 Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Occupation	Actor, Singer, Dancer
Known for	Turning Red, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, Work It
Awards	Winner, Dancing with the Stars Season 25 (2017) · Broadway.com Audience Choice Award, Favorite Replacement Male, Hadestown (2024)

Most young actors who win Dancing with the Stars return to television grateful for the renewed visibility. Jordan Fisher left that trophy behind and went looking for something heavier. He has spent the better part of a decade on Broadway stages, in roles that carried unstated assumptions about who they were for — and he has quietly been the person doing the rewriting.

Fisher was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and was raised by his grandparents, Rodney and Pat Fisher, who enrolled him in gymnastics first and pointed him toward theater second. When the family eventually relocated to Los Angeles, he began accumulating minor television credits — a recurring part in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, sun-drenched roles in Teen Beach Movie and its sequel, a longer-running stint on Liv and Maddie. Nothing in that early résumé pointed toward where he was actually headed.

The first real indication came in 2016, when he was cast as Doody in Fox’s Grease: Live, performing alongside a large-scale production cast and showing enough stage command to suggest this was not where he would stop. Within weeks, he was on Broadway, carrying two roles — John Laurens and Philip Hamilton — in Hamilton. He was twenty-two, making his Broadway debut in the defining American musical of its decade, and it read less like a debut than a declaration of direction.

The following fall brought a detour into television competition that, in retrospect, was not a detour at all. Fisher and his professional partner Lindsay Arnold won the twenty-fifth season of Dancing with the Stars, becoming one of the show’s youngest champion pairs. He then hosted Dancing with the Stars: Juniors. The visibility could have locked him into a safer lane. It did not. He came back to Broadway and took on the leading role of Evan Hansen in Dear Evan Hansen, becoming the first actor of color to play the role full-time on Broadway. He followed that with Anthony Hope in the 2023 revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, then moved to the leading role of Orpheus in Hadestown, which he held through early 2025.

The pattern by this point had become impossible to overlook. When Fisher stepped into the role of Christian in Moulin Rouge! The Musical in 2025, he became the first African-American actor to portray the character on Broadway. These were not ceremonial gestures by producers seeking favorable coverage — Fisher had earned each role through the accumulated evidence of the ones before. The firsts were a consequence, not the strategy.

It is worth noting that the critical conversation around Fisher has not always kept pace with the stage record. His profile tends to generate features organized around his versatility — the dancing, the singing, the gaming, the teen television roots — in ways that can function as a substitute for a harder assessment. He is routinely described as multi-talented in a register that stops short of saying what the record plainly shows: he has quietly built one of the most consistent runs of Broadway leading-man work in his generation, in musicals that demand sustained emotional performance across full evenings.

Away from the stage, Fisher appeared in Netflix’s To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You and provided a voice role in the Pixar film Turning Red. These screen appearances were not incidental to his career — they kept his name in the wider entertainment conversation during a period when his most serious work was happening on stage, nightly, in front of a live audience.

In November 2020, he married his longtime partner Ellie Woods. Their son, Riley William, was born in June 2022. Fisher has spoken in interviews about the stabilizing effect of family life on the otherwise itinerant rhythms of a theater career — eight shows a week, for weeks at a time, in roles that demand as much as any he has taken on.

Since March 2026, he has been playing Seymour Krelborn in the Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theatre, opposite Tony Award winner Nikki M. James as Audrey. At thirty-two, Fisher is not positioned as someone waiting for the right film to open a door. The doors he keeps walking through are on stage, and he has made a habit of arriving as the first person through them.

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Tags: actors, Moulin Rouge!, Hamilton, Hadestown, Broadway musicals, Dear Evan Hansen

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