John Gallagher Jr Opens Up About Returning To Spring Awakening 15 Years Later

Fifteen years after the hit Tony-winning Broadway show’s run, the original cast and creative team of Spring Awakening reunited for the HBO documentary Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known and a performance at the 2022 Tony Awards. I spoke with actor John Gallagher Jr, who won a Tony Award in 2007 for his performance as Moritz Stiefel, about returning to the material

“It was such a gift, just a tremendous present, honestly, to get the chance to all be back together under one roof and to perform the show again. Then the sweetness of the deal just being that it got filmed and that this documentary was able to come out so quickly, that was just something that I don't think any of us really saw coming,” said Gallagher Jr about Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known. “It was a bit of a pipe dream when we started talking about it a year or so ago and the fact that it all came together, we all felt incredibly blessed.”

His latest project Gone In The Night tackles themes of immortality and the fears of growing old, which took on a new meaning while returning to Spring Awakening. “There's something about it that I think we almost all understood the material and the roles better now than we did back then coming at it with fifteen years of life experience and age,” he shared. “It almost goes against what you are told in a film like Gone In The Night that actually there's some real benefits from getting older. You get to come at things with a really fresh perspective.”

Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known is streaming on HBO Max, while Gone In The Night hits digital and on demand August 2.