On a balmy mid-March morning, Amy Ryan stood outside of a Brooklyn Heights café, exactly nine minutes—and a full week—early for our planned interview. At this point, I was in Los Angeles, had yet to see her Broadway production of Doubt, and had nothing prepared. I texted her that she had the wrong day, a bit nervous as to whether we’d still meet up as scheduled since her calendar was, well, a little packed. “Hahhahha!” she responded quickly. “Welcome to my tired brain.” She assured me we were all set for next week.
No human alive can blame Ryan for the tired brain. She’s spent the last two months pulling off what many in her field would consider next to impossible.
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A revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Tony Award–winning play, Doubt: A Parable, was already in previews this February when its lead actress, Tyne Daly, was forced to leave the show due to health issues. Director Scott Ellis and his producers needed to either find a suitable replacement or abandon the project altogether. Ryan was a week away from a ski trip with her family when she got a call from Jim Carnahan, the Broadway casting director who had been her agent back when she was 19, offering her the part of the indomitable Sister Aloysius. She would have next to no preparation time.
“I’d never get the opportunity to do a role like this. It doesn’t come around to me,” says Ryan, an Oscar- and Tony-nominated actor known mostly for supporting parts. “Intellectually I knew I had to say yes. I thought I was being an adult by saying, ‘Let me call you tomorrow.’ But I knew.”
The news went off like an earthquake in New York. “My first thought was, ‘Well, this is perfect, she will be truly perfect,’” says Ryan’s pal Sarah Paulson, who’s currently enjoying an acclaimed Broadway run herself in Appropriate. “Followed quickly by the thought: ‘That’s the scariest fucking thing I can think of having to do as an actor. And there is literally no one more capable than Amy Ryan.” Ryan’s old friend Laura Linney tells me that “more than likely, no future challenge will ever be as frightening as this. And once you know, through experience, that you can face such a challenge, and face it successfully, it strengthens your spine tenfold. That is a great gift that only the bravest artists earn.”
The day after she formally joined Doubt, Ryan started sleeping on an Aerobed in her home office. She’d wake up at 5:30 in the morning. She eliminated caffeine, sugar, and dairy from her diet. She’d read the whole play—a dense and complex study of faith and certainty set in a ’60s Bronx Catholic school—straight through twice, before zeroing in on a given scene. She started developing headaches and popping Advil. She’s a vegetarian, but found herself craving meat like never before (though she never acted on those cravings). “I was running faster than I ever have, internally,” she says. On days where there wasn’t a matinee, she’d head to the Todd Haimes Theatre around noon to rehearse with the cast—which included Liev Schreiber, Zoe Kazan, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine—before returning home to go over the play by herself all over again for the afternoon. She sat for a few previews in which Daly’s understudy, Isabel Keating, took the reins.
Then, not even two weeks after saying yes, Ryan took the stage. “That first day in the dressing room, it was so weird. I remember crying like a baby, going, ‘Boo hoo, oh no,’” she says. “And I talked myself out of it. I said: ‘No. No. No. Not the time for emotions.’”
She tells me this over coffee—yes, she’s now sneaking a few cups—at that same Brooklyn Heights café. She beams a kind of relaxed confidence, maybe even a little bit of pride. Ryan has successfully filtered out most of the noise and speculation surrounding this all-timer of a show-must-go-on Broadway saga, but knows, in essence, what I know: A few weeks beyond opening night, this Doubt is a certified, critically acclaimed hit, with its limited engagement already extended to meet audience demand (it now runs until April 21). “The panic has subsided,” Ryan tells me with a smile. “And the fun has started.”