Exclusive Interview: Kelli O’Hara on Bringing ‘Fallen Angels’ to Cinemas and Discovering a Different Side of Her Craft

Tony Award winner Kelli O’Hara has built a celebrated career bringing emotional depth and soaring vocals to some of musical theater’s most memorable roles. In Fallen Angels, her first Broadway play, she reveals another thrilling dimension of her artistry, pairing impeccable comedic timing with the freedom to let loose. Her Tony-nominated turn as Julia Sterroll finds her embracing Noël Coward’s wit and physical comedy with equal assurance, capturing the hilarity and vulnerability of a woman whose carefully maintained composure begins to unravel.

Directed by Scott Ellis, Fallen Angels follows Julia and her longtime friend Jane, played by Rose Byrne, whose comfortable married lives are upended by the anticipated arrival of a former lover they share. With their husbands away, champagne flows, old rivalries resurface, and an afternoon of anticipation spirals into comic chaos. Filmed live at Broadway’s Todd Haimes Theatre, the Roundabout Theatre Company production arrives in movie theaters on October 22, giving a wider audience the chance to experience the pair’s irresistible chemistry and Coward’s comedy of desire and appearances.

Pop Culturalist spoke with O’Hara about the creative leap of taking on her first Broadway play, finding the balance between Coward’s precise language and the abandon of physical comedy, and building trust with Byrne. She also reflected on the audience’s role in shaping each performance and what it means to have this defining chapter of her career preserved and shared beyond Broadway.

PC: You’ve said that the stage is your school and that you’re constantly a student of your craft. With Fallen Angels being your first Broadway play, what did that experience teach you, and how has it shaped the artist you are today?
Kelli: Oh my goodness. It was a brand-new class. It was like I stepped into a different wing of the school. As an ingénue and soprano, which is how I started my career, I’m never asked to do anything comedic. Sopranos never get to be funny. I make jokes about that all the time. [laughs]

So this was such a great opportunity to not only sink my teeth into Noël Coward’s language and the period piece that it is, but also to stretch, leap, improvise, and try my hand at comedy. At the end of the day, it turns out that as long as you’re honest, keep the stakes high, and aren’t trying to be funny but are actually just telling the story, oftentimes, as long as your timing isn’t terrible, it works out. That is, if the writing, direction, and your teammate are great. I had all of that on this project.

It gave me a lot of confidence going forward. It has changed me for the better. I’m so glad this opportunity happened. You never quite know when you take the leap and say, “Yeah, I’ll do that thing,” if it’ll work out, and this one did.

PC: Your comedic timing is fantastic. There’s also this interesting juxtaposition between staying true to the original dialogue and having the freedom to play with the physical comedy. They almost feel like two distinct languages working together. How did you approach each, and how did one inform the choices you made with the other?
Kelli: That’s a great point. I do think that they are absolute opposites. There’s that uppity, upper-class perfection in the way he’s written it, especially with Julia, my character. Then there’s a looseness in this particular case that comes from alcohol, which brings the comedy in. [laughs] But again, he writes that. This is his script.

That’s how you reach the comedy: you have the language going in one direction and the wild abandon going in the other. It was a perfect recipe, especially with the high stakes of it all. The subject matter seems silly, but we took it very seriously. All of those things worked really well together.

PC: Speaking of Julia, you’ve described her as the steadier, more dominant one in this lifelong friendship. Maurice’s return disrupts both that dynamic and the perfect life she thinks she’s living. What interested you most about exploring the gap between who Julia presents herself to be and what she finally allows herself to feel?
Kelli: It’s such an example or representation of what’s happening in the world today with social media and influencing. It’s an interesting, vulnerable, and funny thing to watch a facade come down. I love being part of that. To literally and figuratively open the curtains and see what’s going on behind there. Sometimes it can be very painful and sometimes it can be hysterical. The more I leaned in Julia’s own perception of herself and the perception she thought she was giving the world, the better the fall was when she had too much to drink.

PC: You and Rose had so much fun doing the reading of Fallen Angels for a benefit gala that you wanted to keep it going. How did that trust and connection grow as you brought the play to Broadway, and what did it allow you to explore together?
Kelli: The neatest thing that happened with this project is that Scott Ellis had this idea to do the play. The former leader of Roundabout, Todd Haimes, really, really wanted to do a Noël Coward piece, and Scott respected that. He put us together. I think it was random. He’s dear for asking me to do it, and then he got Rose Byrne to say yes. How he did that, I’m not sure.

We had never met before the day we did that reading. We only had one reading. We walked through all of it and then did it for an audience. Because we fell into such an easy rapport and trust with each other, we all just looked at each other and said, “Let’s keep going.” So when we got into the room two years later to make this happen, Rose was juggling being nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA, and traveling the country and the world. We had to trust that we were going to get there.

Knowing that we had that one evening of success without a lot of fanfare or worry, we knew we could do it. And we did. We just all had to be in the room, trust each other, and not overthink it too much.

PC: There were so many moments in this play when I was laughing out loud. So much of comedy comes down to your individual choices and how you play off your scene partners, and you all had fantastic chemistry. How did your castmates’ choices inform your own? Was there a scene that came to life in an unexpected way because of that collaboration?
Kelli: The real collaborator, especially with a comedy, is the audience. Especially in that scene where we’re drinking too much champagne. Everything is choreographed within an inch of itself. Tracee Chimo, who plays Saunders, the maid, knows where she puts the dishes down. It’s choreographed when we take a drink, when we go to the door. We didn’t know what that was, and couldn’t know what that was, until we had that fourth party, which is the audience, to give us that feedback.

Within the first few weeks of previews, we tried different things. It got tighter as we learned. You have to be willing to do several shows where there’s a lot of egg on your face to get somewhere. To the people who saw the first previews: I don’t know what you saw. [laughs]

PC: What I love about this theatrical release is that it gives people who couldn’t see the play on Broadway a chance to experience it. What does it mean to you to have this performance preserved and shared with a wider audience, especially given how underappreciated this piece has been? Is there another underappreciated play or production you hope gets a similar release?
Kelli: First, the play has sat almost dormant for a hundred years. It was done in a few places. But for the sake of Noël Coward, just to be awakened again to his very young brilliance and to go back and maybe revisit Hay Fever or anything else of his that you may be less familiar with.

Having it preserved was very important to me when I found out we were going to do it, because it was such a beautiful moment in my professional life to get to do something different than I usually do. South Pacific and The King and I were preserved, and I’m so proud of that, but this feels like a different side of me. That feels really great.

When I think about other things being preserved in that way, I remember watching the PBS filming of Sunday in the Park with George and being so impacted as a young student. The Light in the Piazza was also preserved, but I had left the show by then, which was heartbreaking for me, not to be a part of that. But I do know that people will go back and watch. I wish we had preserved Days of Wine and Roses and things like that, where not a lot of people got to see it.

To keep up with Kelli, follow her on Instagram. Fallen Angels hits theaters on October 22nd.

Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman