This Year’s Tony Nominees in Portraits

‘Purlie Victorious’

Kara Young

“My mime teacher had a double-jointed hand, and she taught me this skit about a dying butterfly in a forest. You find the dying butterfly, and you pick it up and your hand becomes the butterfly. And I performed this very often because I was the one who was able to do the double-jointed hand.”

‘Purlie Victorious’

Leslie Odom Jr.

“I played Martin Luther King in our Black history show in kindergarten. The pictures that I hold the dearest are of my grandmother and my father clapping in the front row. My dad looks like I just won the Nobel. He’s so proud that I’ve memorized my little four lines as Martin Luther King.”

‘An Enemy of the People’

Jeremy Strong

“One of the real formative experiences for me was seeing Ian Holm do ‘Lear’ at the National in the ’90s. He was a little man with tremendous, immense power and vulnerability. And I remember him on the heath at the end — he was naked in front of the well-heeled audience, and I remember being very affected by a human being willing to be that open and unprotected in front of people. It changed my life.”

‘mary jane’

Rachel McAdams

“I saw ‘Cats’ in Kitchener, Ontario. My dad was a mover, and he actually helped move the company, so we got free tickets. I was 8. I was walking on air when I came out of that show. I still remember looking down at my little white patent leather shoes and thinking my whole world has been cracked open.”

‘Merrily We Roll Along’

Daniel Radcliffe

“The first time I was onstage was in a school play called ‘Nellie the Elephant,’ when I was 5 or 6 — I was dressed as a monkey. But my first proper stage appearance was when I was about 13, in ‘The Play What I Wrote,’ that Kenneth Branagh directed, and they had a different celebrity in every night, and I did like three performances. As the guest, if you knew the lines, you could get laughs. So even knowing very little about comedy, I got laughs, and I remember feeling, ‘Oh, that’s incredible fun.’”

‘Merrily We Roll Along’

Jonathan Groff

“The first time I remember being onstage was playing Sandy, the dog, in a dance recital. I was 4 years old, and they were doing a number from ‘Annie,’ and I was in a dog head costume, and I remember hearing the audience laugh at me moving my head back and forth, and I was hooked.”

‘Merrily We Roll Along’

Lindsay Mendez

“The first show I saw on Broadway was at the Gershwin Theater. I saw ‘Show Boat.’ It was just so grand and incredible. I was, I think, 12 years old. I had loved theater as a little kid, but getting to see it at that level, it hit me for the first time that I could pursue it as an adult for a living.”

‘Appropriate’

Sarah Paulson

“Janet McTeer in ‘A Doll’s House’ — that was a very early, if not the first, Broadway show that my mother took me to see. I was in the first row of the mezzanine, and I’ll never forget the energy with which she came onstage. It was like watching a lightning bolt.”

‘Appropriate’

Corey Stoll

“Courtney B. Vance was playing Corey in the original ‘Fences,’ and I remember seeing that production with James Earl Jones, who was so obviously this powerhouse. But I remember seeing this young man going toe to toe with him, and holding his own against this colossus. It really blew me away that the theater was a place where there were all these different forms of power, and each person can hold an audience’s attention and affection.”

‘Stereophonic’

Will Brill, Eli Gelb, Juliana Canfield, Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka

“My parents took me to see ‘Peter Pan’ at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. I was 3, and I was sitting on my mom’s lap, and Captain Hook had Peter Pan tied up, and apparently I stood up on my mom’s lap, and I screamed, ‘You poo-poo head!’ at Captain Hook.” — Will Brill

“I saw Mark Rylance play Olivia in ‘Twelfth Night.’ And I was so astonished by his tragic sense of humor. I had been planning on doing an Olivia monologue to audition for school, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it because he’s too brilliant.’ I changed my monologue.” — Juliana Canfield

“I did three different productions of ‘Grease.’ I played Danny every time, at 12, 14, and then my senior year of high school. When I was Danny my senior year, all of a sudden the girls started to take notice.” — Tom Pecinka

‘Cabaret’

Eddie Redmayne

“The first show I ever saw was ‘Cats,’ when I was about 7 years old. I was up in the circle, and a cat crawled out of a hole somewhere and gave me the fright of my life. I found it utterly terrifying and completely exhilarating.”

‘Cabaret’

Gayle Rankin

“The thing that drew me to theater was, I was always fascinated by people. I was really quiet as a kid, and so people watching was like my TV. I remember sitting at a Starbucks in Glasgow when I was, like, 12, watching people for hours on end.”

‘Cabaret’

Bebe Neuwirth

“It wasn’t until I saw ‘Pippin,’ when I was 13, that I decided that I was going to be a dancer on Broadway and do that guy’s choreography. I didn’t know I was talking about god [Bob Fosse]. I didn’t know anything. It just resonated so deeply for me — I could feel that movement in my body, and I knew that I was watching an aspect of myself when I saw that.”

‘Cabaret’

Steven Skybell

“I did children’s theater in Lubbock, Tex. My first show was ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ I played [a] king — I was already character-typed as the older character even then. And from the time I was 10, I knew I wanted to be an actor. I’ve just slowly been pretending all along the way.”

‘Hell’s Kitchen’