Leslie Odom Jr. Risks It All in ‘Hamilton’ (Backstage):
Although graduating with honors from Carnegie Mellon provided a technical foundation that enabled him to take on eight shows a week in musicals including “Leap of Faith” and “Venice,” Odom found there was one thing missing in his acting training: a sense of danger. “I knew how to stay on my mark, I knew how to work. But eventually the work was dead.” It took several years of booking TV gigs in Los Angeles and doing exactly what was required of him on set for Odom to realize none of his art inspired him. “There was no risk! I went to four years of school, no risk. Because I was trying to get an A, why would I risk? If I fail, you’re going to give me a C.”
If he had it his way, in fact, classes would be pass or fail; after all, grades don’t exist in the real world. “I succeeded in that system,” Odom admits, “but it took me about 10 years to let that shit go. You [should] decide in your mind whether you did A work—because that’s what life is.”
Several agonizing years into his rut—“There’s a market for safe and bland, and I was firmly in that market”—Odom was reviewing the material for an upcoming film audition. “This idea occurred to me,” he recalls with a grin. “Something really scary. These people were either going to call my agent and say, ‘That was the worst thing we’ve ever seen.’ Or they were going to say, ‘Holy shit.’ ”
Odom opted for the scary choice, and in doing so, created a school-like assignment for himself: If he was laughed out of the audition, he’d call it a win anyway. “That was my A+. Because I had never risked that before. I gave [myself] permission, for the first time as a professional performer, to fail.” That the casting directors ended up adoring him (he tested but did not ultimately book the film) was beside the point. The point, he says, is that he’d succeeded in embracing the danger that makes an actor alive.
Had he not taken that leap, there would be nothing spontaneous or rough about his Aaron Burr. “I don’t even know if I would have the job,” Odom says. From the first workshop at Vassar College all the way to a recent concert reading at the White House, the welcoming environment provided by Miranda, Kail, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, and musical director Alex Lacamoire allowed Odom to develop those risk-taking muscles. “The only reason ‘Hamilton’ looks the way it does is because we were allowed to fall on our faces.
“So as an early-career actor—which I guess I kind of still am, I wouldn’t consider myself a midcareer actor!—you have to give yourself the permission to be raw and dangerous,” he says. It’s a similar revelation, perhaps, to the one in Odom’s Act 2 showstopper, “The Room Where It Happens.” Finally forced to confront his ambition, Burr realizes playing it safe will get him nowhere. All success requires risk. How else would an actor get into that proverbial room?
As Odom says, “If you do something you’ve never done before, you’re going to get something you’ve never gotten before.”
His No. 1 piece of advice echoes one of the clearest messages of “Hamilton.” “You can’t take it for granted that there’s someone who can tell your story as well as you can,” says Odom. “If you don’t say it, it’ll never get said.”
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