Rodney Hicks, the Rent original who lost his singing voice and found a film lead in Venice

Rodney Hicks

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

Born	March 28, 1974 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation	Actor and playwright
Known for	Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway, Rent
Awards	Barrymore

Near the end of Shinya Tsukamoto‘s Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, Rodney Hicks has to walk into a classroom of children and answer the question in the title. Allen Nelson, the former Marine he plays, does it out loud, and the whole film leans on that moment of speech. For Hicks, an American actor who spent his twenties and thirties singing in Broadway musicals and was then told he could no longer sing for a living, a voice has never been something to take for granted. What Tsukamoto praises is something else. “The powerful physicality that Rodney had cultivated through years of stage work was like a sensitive antenna,” the Japanese director told Variety, “reaching out to call Allen’s spirit down from heaven.”

That stage work started in Philadelphia, where Hicks was born and raised and where he finished at Roxborough High School. He enrolled at Mansfield University that same autumn and walked away two years later to act full time. His first jobs put him in unlikely company: Lauryn Hill, of the Fugees, in the musical Bring in the Morning, and the director Peter Sellars, who staged the John Adams and June Jordan song-play I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.

The door that mattered was Rent. Hicks was in the company that carried Jonathan Larson’s musical to Broadway in 1996, originating Paul, the man who runs the support group, among other ensemble parts, and covering Benjamin Coffin III, the friend turned landlord everyone calls Benny. He came back years later to play Benny outright and was the last actor in the role when the production closed in September 2008. That final night was filmed and released as Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway, which is still the most widely seen record of his singing.

Between those two runs he built the kind of résumé that rarely makes headlines. He was Peter in the 2000 Broadway revival of Jesus Christ Superstar and Clarence Norris in Susan Stroman’s The Scottsboro Boys, which moved from the Vineyard Theatre to Broadway in 2010. Two years later, back home with the Philadelphia Theatre Company, he took the lead role of Haywood Patterson in the same show and won the Barrymore Award for Outstanding Leading Actor in a Musical. In Portland he became the first Black actor to play Curly in a professional Oklahoma!, in an all-Black production at Portland Center Stage directed by Chris Coleman, the man he would later marry.

Then came Come From Away. Hicks joined the musical about the planes diverted to Newfoundland in a 2014 lab, earned a Helen Hayes nomination for its run at Ford’s Theatre in Washington and opened it on Broadway in March 2017, originating Bob and several other roles. He left on June 14 of that year. The reason, made public that August, was spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that makes the muscles of the voice spasm. “Due to this condition I can no longer sing,” he wrote, adding that his time as a professional singer for the stage had “completed its run.” When the show was filmed for Apple TV+ in 2021, he was not in it.

The tidy version of what followed, a lost voice and a reborn actor, does not match the record, and the film that made him a lead fits it less still. Hicks went back to musicals: he played Walter in Chess at The Muny in St. Louis in 2023. Before this year his screen career was a column of guest spots on NYPD Blue, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Hope & Faith, Leverage and Grimm, plus supporting turns in Mighty Oak and Disney‘s The Slumber Party, so his first leading role arrived in his fifties, at the Venice Film Festival. The reviews were hard on the film. Variety called it turgid and wrote that Hicks is “a Broadway actor of some standing, but it’s very hard to tell here,” because the script leaves him little to play beyond anguish; Screen Daily found it muddled; on Rotten Tomatoes it sits at 27 percent. The prize it took home from Venice, the Leoncino d’Oro, came from a jury of high-school students, a collateral award rather than the main competition’s.

Off the stage he has turned to writing. Since moving to Denver in 2018 he has seen his play FLAME BROILED. or the ugly play premiere at Local Theatre Company in Boulder, reached the semi-finals of the Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Conference with Just Press Save and Ms. Pearl’s Cabaret, and heard Just Press Save read at the 2020 Pride Plays festival under Michael Greif, the director who had staged Rent. A reading of his newer play, inhaleEXHALE, was set for the Laurie Beechman Theatre in New York in April 2026. Hicks, who turned 52 in March, is married to Coleman and describes himself as a meditator.

On screen the work has picked up. He plays Uncle Charlie, a recurring role in Forever, Mara Brock Akil’s Netflix series drawn from the Judy Blume novel, which premiered in May 2025, and he says he is back for its second season. Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, a Japan-United States-Thailand-Vietnam co-production with Geoffrey Rush as Nelson’s counselor, Tatyana Ali and Lily Franky, premiered in competition at Venice in early September 2026, opened in Japanese cinemas through Kino Films on September 11 and screened in the Special Presentations section at Toronto. The financing came with one condition, Tsukamoto explained: a face known around the world. That face was Rush’s. The lead went to a stage actor.

The voice gets its next test in a Broadway house. At a Rent reunion in August 2026 Hicks stood in for Jesse L. Martin and sang Tom Collins’s half of “I’ll Cover You” opposite Wilson Jermaine Heredia. On October 26, 2026, he returns with the original company to the Richard Rodgers Theatre for Rent‘s 30th anniversary concert, directed again by Greif, livestreamed and staged for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, singing again in the show he first joined at twenty-two.

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Tags: actors, Shinya Tsukamoto, Geoffrey Rush, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, Rent, Rodney Hicks

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