Juliana Canfield Goes from 'Succession' Assistant to Rock Star
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For Juliana Canfield, this is a moment of transition. That makes a lot of sense because the character she played earlier and is gearing up to play again is right in the same place. Last fall, Canfield appeared in the Off-Broadway show Stereophonic, which became a New York Times Critic’s Pick, a genuine word-of-mouth sensation, and was selected to move to Broadway, where it opens today. Canfield plays Holly, a singer and keyboard player in a ‘70s-era Fleetwood Mac-esque band that’s holed up in a studio while they record their sophomore album. They have a major hit behind them with their first record, and they’re on the brink of superstardom (if they can finish the album), just like the cast of Stereophonic is.
“It’s very meta. Part of the impact of the play is that they’re there for over a year in an echo chamber with only each other and no real sense of the outside world. The news you hear, the next issue of Billboard coming out, are these far-away calls that make their way into the castle walls,” Canfield says. “But with this play, I think because the run of the previous iteration came so closely before, I feel the energy around the next production. It feels like we’re on the crest of a wave, and there’s less of a sense of separation between the process and the sharing of our final piece.” The making of Stereophonic, writer David Adjmi’s first show on Broadway, is a great story in itself: It has a cast of young relative newcomers, songs written by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, and a plot full of brutal fights and twisted love stories.
Canfield, who is 32, grew up in the New York City suburb Sneden’s Landing and Washington, D.C. as an only child. “They are creative, but they don’t have creative jobs,” she says of her parents. “My dad’s always calling me and saying, ‘I have this great idea for screenplay.’ I’m like, ‘You are a lawyer. You have a really busy job. When are you going to write a screenplay?’ And my mom is a very visually rigorous person. Her pursuit of beauty feels professional, even though it’s just how she lives her life.” Canfield went to Yale for undergrad and then got an MFA from the school of drama there.
Sneden’s Landing had a children’s Shakespeare company when Canfield was young. “I was really shy when I was a kid. At my birthday, when people sang Happy Birthday to me, I would burst into tears. But I did As You Like It in the first grade and this whole other part of my personality was turned on. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” she says. “Suddenly I loved being looked at.” A professor at Yale told her that acting is a profession you have to choose over and over and over. “There are many moments in an actor’s life where there’s a fork in the road, and again, the decision to pursue it. I’ve just continued to make it. At this point, I’ve never really felt close to deciding something else. I felt that the decision has been affirmed. This play has been an affirmation of it.”
The job that changed her life was playing Jess Jordan, Kendall Roy’s assistant, on Succession. “Succession was such a definitive, all-encompassing experience, and a really big play energetically feels like the only kind of project that might match the enormity of that one. It kind of recalibrates my inner gravitational feel,” she says. “Like Succession was very heavy, very large, and this play just requires so much. It’s kind of just straightening out the fabric a little bit. And maybe that’s part of what some of the other actors on that show [are doing theater.] The night after we speak, Canfield will go to the opening of An Enemy of the People, which stars Jeremy Strong, her former on-screen boss, while Succession’s Sarah Snook is in The Picture of Dorian Gray on the West End, and Natalie Gold (who played Rava Roy) is appearing in Appropriate.
Strong, somewhat known for his professional intensity, was a wonderful colleague and scene partner for Canfield. She can’t stop thinking about her last day on set. “We were going through the scene, and we weren’t talking between setups. We did it a couple of times,” she says. “And then, before he went back into the car on one of the setups, he was like, ‘Hey, J,’” referring to both Jess and Juliana. “And he was just, ‘Good job, really good.’ I was like, ‘I can’t...’ He was such a great person to work with and I learned so much from him.”
She’s found an equally warm cast at Stereophonic. “I didn’t even really realize how close we became during the first run of the play,” she says. “I think I feel a real sense of physical intimacy and grounded friendship, camaraderie amongst us. We all know each other so well and I feel that we have a real sense of earned peace and quiet and comfort with each other, which helps with the play so much.”
I’m meeting Canfield at a surreal time, weeks before she’ll make her Broadway debut in the most packed theater season in recent memory. “I was talking to someone the other day who said that this Broadway season feels like the first one since COVID that has all of the energy that the ones preceding COVID had. There is something sort of frenzied about it,” she says. She’s wanted to perform on Broadway for so long and it feels like something of a pinnacle in her career. That she’s doing it with this particular show makes it feel even more special. “I do think it’s particularly sweet to be able to make my debut this way. It’s been such a long road for David Adjmi to get it to this point. He’s been working on this play for 10 years. To be a part of a very long journey reaching some kind of a conclusion feels very sweet. That this company originated these parts, I feel like we built the architecture of the play, the architecture of the music. How it’s orchestrated was because of our strengths and our weaknesses.”
Through her character Holly, Canfield has become a real musician. The cast members play live on stage, with an incredible naturalness. “In the Playwrights Horizons run, before every show, we would do soundcheck and go through all of the music,” Canfield says. “One day we were doing it and it was late in the run, so there was a sense of casualness about the whole process. [My co-star] Sarah Pidgeon turned to me and said, ‘When we started this, we really sounded like two girls in the church choir, and now we kind of sound rock and roll.’”
Butler was hugely impressed by Canfield’s efforts. “I mean, what a joy to work with. She’s amazingly honest, insanely talented in every dimension. They did a reading at Playwrights Horizons without the songs before we cast it and she was so compelling. I was very confident that she was going to be a great piano player and great singer,” says Butler. “Her voice is just herself and it has a quality and it still maintains that quality when she’s doing a British accent. Her voice does this magical thing where it is both of the period and of Juliana and of the character Holly. I find it so transcendent to hear her singing the songs.”
In the fall, during the rehearsal period of Stereophonic’s Off-Broadway run, the cast opened for Butler’s band Will Butler and the Sister Squares at a show in Brooklyn. “I was dragged into that venue kicking and screaming. When they brought up the potential of us opening for them, I was adamant that we didn’t. I really, really, really, really thought that if we played in front of people that the audience would hate us and it would ruin our confidence, and that we wouldn’t be able to do the play. I was so nervous about the potential for ego death,” she says. The cast did three or four songs for an audience of around 45. For Canfield, it was a thrill like nothing she’d ever experienced.
From the tail end of the play’s run at Playwrights Horizons into January, Canfield was filming a role in American Horror Story: Delicate. Then she had a brief pause, before going right back in for Stereophonic rehearsals. The days leading up to the play opening are all about getting all her “ducks in a row. I’m doing things every night, seeing friends, seeing family, going to Knicks games. Doing this play, it’s long and pretty demanding. When I’m doing it, I do feel reluctant to push myself socially,” she says. “I think that in this next iteration, I’m sort of going to hold myself more accountable to having light, lovely hangouts throughout the process, because it can feel a little bit lonely. The subject matter of the play starts to bleed up to my regular life, and the more I can hold onto tether it from my actual life, the better it feels to do it.”
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