Andrew Burnap wasn’t exactly convinced about returning to the theater. It was summer 2022 and Burnap was riding on the high from winning the Tony Award for his work in “The Inheritance,” which had been the talk of Broadway before the pandemic shuttered live theater, and he’d largely shifted his focus to film and television. He’d worked on “WeCrashed,” the WeWork series starring Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto, and “Under the Banner of Heaven” with Andrew Garfield, not to mention landing the male lead of the mega Disney “Snow White” film and shooting an A24 psychological horror called “The Front Room.”
“Theater’s always my first love. It’s always the thing that I will always want to return to, but to tell you the truth, I was not searching for it,” Burnap says. “I was not like, ‘Ooh, I want to get back to the theater.’ And everyone around me whose voices I really trust were kind of like, ‘One hundred percent, let’s stay in the television and film world.’ So this was kind of an interruption of that. And the theater will interrupt when it wants to. The universe was telling me this is the way forward. I certainly was not looking for it or searching for it; it sort of just stopped me in my tracks and I went with it.
“‘The Inheritance’ was obviously a life-changing experience in so many different ways, but it almost killed me, in the sense that it just took so much of my life — in a way that I was happy to give it,” Burnap adds. “I then was sort of very, very happy and excited to move more toward television and film. The ball was really rolling with TV and film.”
Word then reached him that there was a production of “Camelot” in the works at Lincoln Center. Despite growing up a lover of classic musical theater, “Camelot” had not been one of his favorites — he was more of an “Oliver Twist” and “Singin’ in the Rain” fan. When he was asked if he’d be interested in “Camelot,” he didn’t jump right away.
“But when I saw that Bart Sher was directing it and Aaron Sorkin was rewriting the book, I knew I would be the stupidest person in the world to not be interested in doing this,” Burnap says. “And theater is a pretty tough schedule. When you’re doing a show, specifically a show like this, you pretty much have to live like a monk. And so my one hangup with it was, ‘Do I want to dedicate my life to this again in a way that is sort of the all-consuming beast that I know it to be?’”
It turns out that yes, he very much did. Burnap is starring opposite Phillipa Soo in the new production, which is open now at Lincoln Center, in a reimagined take on the Lerner & Loewe classic.
“I think the original has some wonderful charm in it, and specifically, has magic in it. There are forces at work that are not like our world. Aaron Sorkin has made the decision to take that magic out of it and make it as urgent as possible,” Burnap says. “I think when it becomes a story about a man trying to make the world better with the position of power that he’s given without any forces other than just humanity, I think it makes that story that much more obviously relatable and sort of contemporary, and urgent and necessary.”
Burnap’s win of the Tony came in 2021, in the midst of the pandemic when the theater world was still very much reeling. While it was a moment that every actor dreams of coming true, the timing of it all gave Burnap a wake-up call of why he does what he does.
“It became a sort of, I don’t want to say ‘unnecessary,’ but it became a thing that was like, ‘Oh, actually, this isn’t why we do it.’ And that really became crystal-clear in the pandemic,” he says. “That when the world stopped, everything came really into focus of what’s important and what’s not. And so, not that the Tony Award is not important, but it’s not the reason why we do what we do.”
Up next, Burnap will be seen in the much-anticipated “Snow White” movie, playing a new character called Jonathan, whom he describes as a “Robin Hood type.”
“Working with Gal [Gadot] and Rachel [Zegler] was a dream,” Burnap says. “Jonathan doesn’t take anything seriously including, at some times, the movie itself. I basically get to come in and try to offer a little bit of humor and sarcasm and detachment for Snow White, then say, ‘No, you need to take this seriously.’ It’s also dealing with the question of, how does one make the world a fairer place? Instead of a princess getting saved by a prince, I think it is more of a story of a princess finding herself, finding her voice, finding her strength, and saving all those around her.”
The film is expected to be released in 2024 from Disney; in the meantime, he’s focused on giving his all each night at Lincoln Center.
“I think people will see themselves in this story a little more. I think they’ll see our modern world in the story a little more as well,” Burnap says. “We’re in a world right now where there’s a war going on in Europe. Institutions are disintegrating. There are systems in place that should help society’s most vulnerable that are just not working. And this story points to, ‘Well, can we actually be as great as our ideas? Can we live up to the idealism of our age? Or are we always going to be beaten by humanity’s most base desires?’ And that’s a question that I don’t think ever goes away. I think every generation struggles with that. No matter how much ground is won with each generation, the next one has to come up against those same forces each and every time. And I think we’re just destined to do that dance forever. And so, this version of ‘Camelot’ directly deals with those questions, I think, in a deeper way.”