INTERVIEW: Bryce Ryness turns villainous as Miss Trunchbull in ‘Matilda the Musical’
Matilda the Musical, which is currently playing the Shubert Theatre on Broadway, is a theatrical adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl book, and one of its most iconic characters is Miss Agatha Trunchbull, the abusive headmistress of the title character’s school, Crunchem Hall. She scolds the children, punishes them an ungodly number of times and even throws them in the dreaded Chokey, a small dungeon for pesky students.
Bryce Ryness, who originated the role of Trunchbull on Matilda’s first national tour, takes over the memorable villain Tuesday, June 7 at the Shubert Theatre. The actor, who is an alumnus of Broadway’s Hair and First Date, relishes the chance to continue his character work on such a scarily good role.
Ryness began his work on the production with a sit-down with director Matthew Warchus. They talked about the Trunchbull character, and one item that the actor remembers from the conversation, a tip that still resonates today, has to do with the character’s backstory.
“She was bullied when she was a kid because she was very odd looking and didn’t quite fit in,” Ryness said recently in a phone interview. “And the one thing that she was quite good at was this very masculine sport [hammer throwing], and so it’s out of this place of being hurt and out of that insecurity that she became a tyrant. I latched on to that, so I’m playing someone who is trying to establish authority, male female doesn’t really matter, just someone who is trying to establish authority over who she’s trying to get back at.”
Matilda, the small girl who takes on Trunchbull, decides to win her battle with the misunderstood headmistress by killing her with kindness … and a little telekinesis. The girl comes from a family where her father, a used car salesman, and mother, an amateur ballroom dancer, pay her no attention. The one friend in her life is Miss Honey, a kind-hearted teacher who tries to help Matilda with her predicaments.
“In this instance, the person who is able to forgive and who is able to use their intelligence to lift other people up, that person triumphs,” Ryness said of the title character. “I think it’s a lesson that is worthwhile to hear at any age, that the best use of our time and our resources is to encourage other people and to lift them up rather than try to tear them down to establish you’re dominant.”
When the actor landed the job of Miss Trunchbull for the national tour, he wasn’t familiar with the book. While in grammar school, he read Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach and was impressed by how the author created such a fascinating world.
“I didn’t approach Matilda until after I had booked the job,” he said. “I made a conscious effort of that, that when I went to audition for the show, I didn’t read the book. I just read the script, so that I was acting in the play that the script presented, and then once I got the job, to kind of fill out my education on the world of the play, I read the book. And I was pretty intentional about that, and I think it’s paid off in that I’m able to pull the aspects and the themes from the book that help this stage presentation.”
For his New York offering of Miss Trunchbull, Ryness is looking forward to sleeping in his own bed and shopping at a familiar grocery store with his wife and children. These luxuries were not present when he toured the musical around the United States. “I get to maintain my circle of friends, and I’m immersed in a community that is outside of the world of theater,” he said. “What happens with any sort of touring production, for better or for worse, who you are touring with become your community, and sometimes that’s great. Sometimes that’s not so helpful, so what’s nice about being in Manhattan, and doing the show in Manhattan and living in Manhattan is that the friends that I have are outside of the theater world. And sometimes that’s really helpful in maintaining perspective, or in getting help or to do other things on my day off other than just what everyone else in the cast is doing. And that separation creates balance. It creates perspective, which is healthy.”
Ryness has a unique way of looking at nervousness before beginning a big role. He leans on his experience of playing competitive sports as a child. At 12 years old, he played baseball and found himself in the Little League World Series, playing before crowds of thousands of people. At the time, his father told him a quote that nervousness is simply energy that hasn’t found a place to go. He remembers those words to this day.
“The same feeling that you have Christmas morning is the same feeling before you take a test,” he said. “It’s just energy, and what you choose to do with that energy will dictate if it’s nervousness and anxiety or if it’s excitement, and joy and a positive thing that can fuel you into making great choices and really digging deep and performing in a pretty spectacular way. And so when I go to perform now, I hold on to that, and whenever I feel the butterflies, that’s a good indication that I’m challenging myself and I’m doing something worthwhile and substantial.”
Performing in a show over several months helps build up one’s theatrical endurance. Ryness likened it to pumping out 20 pushups a day. The first day is difficult, but six months in, those 20 pushups become much easier. “So it’s an extremely challenging role, but you build up a tolerance after a while,” he said. “And then it just becomes about maintaining your overall health.”
The actor’s connection to sports and theater has an interesting link. That high school baseball career ended after he broke his thumb. He was a catcher on the team, and it the injury occurred on the opening day of the season. This unexpected time off from baseball afforded him the chance to focus on his choir class. Then, in college, he joined an a cappella group and eventually moved on to a professional singing group. When that group disbanded in 2004, he started working in musical theater.
“Here I was two years out of college, and I had kind of nothing on my résumé that would allow me to go work at a bank or anything like that,” he said. “So I did musical theater, and just kind of one thing led to another. And it was a good fit.”
Ryness’ success has been substantial. He was nominated for a Drama Desk award for Hair and also performed in First Date, Leap of Faith and Legally Blonde, all on Broadway. Off-Broadway he has appeared in Long Story Short, Fly by Night, Seek Rock City & Other Destinations and Around the World in 80 Days, among other productions.
Throughout this impressive career he always tries to keep his performances fresh and challenging. Staleness is the bane of live theater.
“By a stale performance I mean a performance where you’re not really listening to the other people who are on stage with you,” he said. “That’s kind of a major bummer and breakdown … where you kind of see that someone is phoning it in or kind of going through the motions. You can tell that they’re not listening to the other people on stage, and … you don’t need to have a ton of energy to just listen to the person you’re in the scene with and then respond based on what they said and how they said it, which is different every single night. And that’s always live theater because it’s not robots saying the same lines over and over again on stage. It’s human beings.”
Ryness sees himself as a storyteller on stage, and he loves telling stories. And there may be no better show to tell stories than Matilda the Musical.
“I like being a part of the storytelling process,” he said. “The villain defines the hero, and so if I do a really good job at being a villain, then that means that the hero has to be that much better to overcome the odds. And so the bigger the obstacle I can present, the more satisfying it is for the audience, and really that’s why I’m doing this. That’s why most actors do it, is to just give a great experience for the audience and to tell a story that is compelling and they believe in.”
He added: “It’s so much more fun to be a villain because one of the key things about scary people is unpredictability, people who you cannot anticipate what they’re going to do. Or when you think they’re going to go right, they go left. That’s terrifying, and so that affords me on stage each night a certain degree of freedom to keep people on their toes.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Matilda the Musical is currently playing the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information.
