How The Outsiders Star Sky Lakota-Lynch Went from Bullied Theater Kid to Broadway Star
Matthew Murphy
As Johnny Cade in the new Broadway musical The Outsiders, Sky Lakota-Lynch shines. He completely transforms into a 16-year-old Greaser from Tusla, exuding both the pain and the hope of his character in the inflections in his voice and in his facial expressions. He nails Johnny’s quiet, and vulnerable, demeanour as well as his silent strength.
Fans of the show likely see him as either Johnny Cade, or Sky Lakota-Lynch the Broadway actor, maybe both, but I remember him as the extroverted kid in our high school theater program, with jokes and funny antics to get us through long nights we spent rehearsing productions like Kiss Me Kate and Midsummer Night’s Dream. We haven’t spoken in years; our lives diverged drastically since graduation, him pursuing theatre and me, journalism. But that changes when I pull up to the stage door at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York and an intercom paging my stranger-acquaintance reverberates through the building. “Sky, you have a guest at the stage door.”
Lakota-Lynch greets me with a big flashy smile, arms open for a hug that should feel foreign but instead embodies a long-overdue homecoming. He’s wearing what might be the ‘60s-style faded indigo blue jeans he wears as Johnny in the show, but the white graphic tee he has on is definitely his own. He leads me to his dressing room, across the stage where the show’s story unfolds, a show about teenagers based on a book written by a then-teenage S.E. Hinton for teenagers.
I notice the gravel flooring that the actors incorporate into their choreography seamlessly, as well as the large tire stage right where (spoiler alert) Johnny stabs Soc leader Bob Sheldon to death to save his best friend Ponyboy. We pass Kevin William Paul, the actor who plays Bob, in the backstage wings, and we’re introduced. Trippy, I think to myself. Just last night, I was in the audience, crying literal tears watching his death scene play out so passionately mere feet away.
We look out his dressing room window, which is right above the entrance to the theater, beside the marquee that says THE OUTSIDERS; Lakota-Lynch’s face along with the rest of the cast is printed on the side of the building nearby. Two middle class drama kids from the Philadelphia area, now standing next to each other in a Broadway dressing room.
“I wanted to be a chef,” he tells me about what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I love making food. My grandma loved making food. My grandma's Ethiopian, so it's big in our culture to just make a whole bunch of food. I was around people making food my whole life.”
In the typical Troy Bolton way, he played sports as a kid, had been on the wrestling team, and only fell into theater by chance.
“I took an acting class just to be with my girlfriend,” he laughs.
He won homecoming king his senior year, but he wasn’t immune to bullying or racism. He recalls a particularly horrifying incident on his wrestling team, when his teammates wrote a racial slur on the gym door and covered him in baby powder.
“I was the only person of color on my team, and so I felt very isolated and I felt like I was trying to conform to fit in. I also played football. I played water polo, I ran track and I played lacrosse. [Yet] I am not Black enough. I'm not Native American enough, so I was truly the outsider,” he says.
If you’ve read the book The Outsiders or seen the movie or the show itself, it’s hard not to see the connections between Lakota-Lynch and the Greasers, a group of lower class and poor kids who are outcasts in town and are ostracized by the privileged and very white Socs. Lakota-Lynch, who was also teased for his dyslexia in high school, never says it, but I can only imagine the place he goes to in his mind in order to evoke the absolute place of desperation and loneliness that Johnny feels during the moments he’s abused by both his family and the Socs in the show. But like Johnny, Lakota-Lynch found belonging with a rag-tag group of people who accepted him: theater kids.
Shortly after the shower incident, Lakota-Lynch quit wrestling and auditioned for his first play, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He played one of the background actors as part of a group called “The Rustics.” Theater saved his life, he says.
“I felt like I could be weird and be accepted, and I got to play with the boundaries of how weird I could be and be socially acceptable, and how I could also pour my love into something that everyone seemed to care about,” he says. “I was looking for a sounding board, not someone to tell me what to do all the time. We got to speak someone else's words and everyone listened. It was the first time I ever felt like people were hearing me.”
Lakota-Lynch was absolutely a star on that stage. Not to be cliche, but most of us assumed he’d go far; he just had “it.” And from the looks of social media, it appeared his journey from high school musicals to Broadway was mostly linear, going higher and higher. He attended a performing arts college in New York, The American Musical and Dramatic Academy, got cast in the TV show Iron Fist, and sometime after that made his Broadway debut in Dear Evan Hansen. He started acting in a production of The Outsiders in San Diego, and then the big big break: the Broadway production of The Outsiders.
But what people see on the internet isn’t the full story, and neither is this one. “A lot of people only see Instagram; they only see the 10 pictures that you allow them to see,” he says. “They don't see everything else. They don't see me washing my dishes or crying. They don't see that.”
“[Before Dear Evan Hansen] I was going through a really, really rough patch in my life where I was living in an apartment the size of this,” he gestures around his closet-sized dressing room. “I felt like I was never going to make it. I felt like the only way I was going to make it was conforming to network television and playing into their hands, which is what I was doing at the time. I would be handed monologues like ‘Black [character]’ that I just didn't connect to. Right after college, in order to try to get a job, [I was] going in for auditions where it's a masked character. You'll never see my face, and I have to be Black or Puerto Rican and I have to say, ‘f*ck you b*tch,’ and point a gun. Because they didn't know what else to give to me, because there was no source material for people like me or you. That's what it was in 2011. We didn't have Hamilton. In Dear Evan Hansen, I was the first male of color in that show. Now with The Outsiders, I'm the first Native American person playing a non-Native American specific role.”
Lakota-Lynch admits that he really wanted to give up during the pandemic when the original plans to star in The Outsiders on Broadway with a different director, which he was cast for in 2018, fell through.
“I was like, well, I'm going to have to re-audition from the bottom up for something else in a new job. And I was like, I might as well just do what I want to do, which is cook. [But] I'm like, I don't have a culinary degree, so what's the next thing?”
Luckily, The Outsiders hit the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and was picked up by producer Angelina Jolie, who loved it so much she wanted to bring it to New York. Despite the ups and downs, Lakota-Lynch is still on Broadway. He made it. He admits that it feels amazing, but also that success can change people.
“I know what it's like to lose people. I know what it's like for the bottom to drop out any day,” he says. “So yes, this is all amazing and I'm so grateful for it, but I'm more grateful for, [and] this sounds so cheesy, but waking up in the morning. Or being able to say, ‘I love you’ to somebody. Or walking down the street and seeing someone smiling rather than this is just part of the cog. This is what I do for a living. Which is a beautiful thing, but I can zoom out and go, there's more to life.”
It’s this outlook that enables him to have an answer when I ask him what advice he has for young people who have big dreams like Broadway: “Keep going.”
As for what’s next, there’s a few plans on the horizon, but he’s focused on playing Johnny for the next year, one of his dream roles. But what if you become famous famous I ask, not-so-subtly hinting at the Tony Award nominations, for which — just days after our interview — will list him as a nominee for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical alongside Daniel Radcliffe.
“I don't know,” he responds. “I think I'll still be Sky.”
The day before our interview, I’m at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre stage door after a Wednesday night production of The Outsiders so that I can get autographs from the actors — just like Lakota-Lynch and I did during our high school drama club field trips. It’s a sacred ritual. Two audience members join the stage door crowd and point to Lakota-Lynch’s face on the playbill. They’re waiting for him, too.
When he emerges from backstage, he’s already smiling from ear to ear. I swear it feels like he’s actually omitting light, the way that the spotlights hit him when he sings his final goodbye to Ponyboy. He hugs me from across the metal barrier that separates the cast from the crowd. At this point, I’m no longer hugging a Broadway actor; I’m hugging someone from home, specifically, someone who found safety and belonging in the same exact place, at the same exact time, with the same group of people as I did when we were teenagers. People who loved us and saw us for who we really were, during a time in our lives when we were still figuring out what that looked like. A lot has changed, but also nothing at all.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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