Baseball on Broadway - actor Jarrod Emick - Interview

Interview, June, 1994 by Peter Galvin

Actor Jarrod Emick gives a grand-slam performance as slugger Joe Hardy in the musical Damn Yankees

Joe Hardy, Jarrod Emick's character in the current Broadway revival of the '50s musical Damn Yankees, has to spend a fair amount of stage time walking around in his underwear. And if the truth be told, Emick has a pretty swell body. But there's a lot more to the actor's performance as champion baseball-player Hardy than how pumped he looks walking around the locker room in his skivvies. Endowing the role of Hardy with both wide-eyed innocence and worldly wisdom, Emick wins over baseball and theater fans alike with his magnetic ability to hit homers and high notes nightly. Raised in Oral, South Dakota, the actor, twenty-four, got his start in the ensemble of Les Miserables on Broadway. He went on to star as the male lead in Miss Saigon, first in the touring company and then in New York. The refreshingly candid Emick and I sat down for lunch in a Greenwich Village restaurant one recent afternoon to chat about subjects as wide-ranging as baseball, theater, and sheep ranching.

PETER GALVIN: Are you a big baseball fan?

JARROD EMICK: I could watch baseball all day long. I got to go to the Yankees' opening game. It was a beautiful day.

PG: Did you play as a kid?

JE: Yeah. My dad was actually coach of my Little League team.

PG: Was it hard having your father coach you? My father coached me as a kid, and he probably picked on me more than anyone else.

JE: [laughs] Well, I suppose they don't want to play favorites, so they go in the opposite direction. No, my dad was a great coach. He was one of three coaches, so it wasn't just him making the decisions.

PG: Playing baseball looks like a lot of fun in your show.

JE: The show portrays a time when guys played ball because they wanted to play. You see interviews with guys who played back then, and they tell about how they had to wash their own uniforms; they had to find their own way to get to a game. They played for nothing.

PG: I've never cared about sports, and watching your show made me wonder, as I have many times before, if, as a man, I should. Culturally, I think we're conditioned as boys and men to be interested in sports. Did you ever feel any kind of pressure to play sports when you were growing up?

JE: My dad always wanted us to do some kind of athletics. I was small in high school and I always wanted to play football. I could have played football, but to tell you the truth, I just didn't want to get crushed. These guys were huge! There were times I would've given up everything I had just to be able to be a big-time football player, like my best friend Bryan, and to be as big as he was. But I wasn't a real nerd either. I just kind of rode right in the middle.

PG: Did you want to play football to be one of the guys?

JE: I played baseball and ran track, so I don't think anyone else ever doubted . . . I mean I guess it could be called a masculinity thing, but I never thought of it like that. I just always wished I was big enough to play football. I think I was eighty-two pounds from sixth grade to eighth grade, and in high school I never broke one-fifty.

PG: How tall are you now?

JE: Six feet.

PG: What do you weigh?

JE: One-seventy-five. I grew a lot in college. In more ways than one.

PG: Did you sing and act in high school?

JE: Yes.

PG: In my high school, the kids that did theater were called theater fags. The most popular kids were the football players and the cheerleaders.

JE: I had a coach--a really great guy--who would always call us "those fine-arts fairies." But he always said it in fun. He would come to the shows.

PG: But why should actors and singers be called fairies at all?

JE: It's South Dakota, man, you know?

PG: It's not just South Dakota. It was that way in Massachusetts, where I'm from. And the people in my school didn't say it in "fun." They'd say it venomously. It's such a narrow view.

JE: I guess I always thought of acting as a legitimate career choice and that I could make something of myself. My parents were always proud of me--100 percent. I'm sure there was nothing my dad would have liked better than to see me get any kind of regular job or a mechanical engineering degree like he did. He's the kind of person that says about fifteen words in a year, but when he does talk, you listen. And I think of him as probably the most open-minded, liberal Republican I've ever met. He'd say, "As long as you're having a good time, do what you want to do." Mom was even better. It's really a cliche, but it's true: I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for her.

PG: Did you always live in South Dakota?

JE: No, I was born in Virginia. My father was in the military for twenty years and retired a lieutenant colonel. By the time I hit the fifth grade, we were in South Dakota. For me, there's no other place to live. I just like to be in a place where I've got a good hundred acres around me. You can leave your keys in your car; you don't lock your doors. I've been driving since I was eight or nine, driving out to my father's ranch.