I think everyone, every character in Dear Evan Hansen is… sort of damaged, for want of a better word. And they’re very intense individuals, every single one of them. Um, and they all kind of, you know, navigate their way through this grief, or this loneliness, in their own, in their own kind of way. And I think Jared is literally one rung above Evan in the social ladder, really, you know. He hasn’t got any friends, he’s as lonely as Evan is. He just has a couple more defense mechanisms to kind of hide and shield himself from the, the loneliness of being a high school teenager in Middle America. Um, and so I kind of, I try my best to kind of play him as, you know, as broken as Evan is, but just, he’s got the comedy, he’s got the sarcasm, to the, you know, the sardonic way of kind of skipping through. And it’s obviously protected him from becoming Evan, who doesn’t have those defense mechanisms, really. So I tried my best to try and make him as much as, uh, a kind of full-bodied — because of course he is the funny guy, and of course he thinks, you know, he’s, his way of looking at Evan is a way of going, “Well, at least I’m better than you.”
