That, in turn, landed him in the Jimmy Awards, which is the national competition, and though the event was virtual, it was still life-changing: Cooley sang a song from “ Tuck Everlasting,” and became a finalist. He won a prize - outstanding actor in a lead role - at the Blue Star Awards, a musical theater competition for Kansas City-area high school students. “By my senior year, I realized, I had done so many shows,” he said, “and I was like, ‘Oh crap, I think I actually want to try doing this as a career.’” Cooley wound up in the ensemble, and was hooked. HOME IS OVERLAND PARK, Kan., where Cooley was a choir kid with no stage experience when the theater program at his suburban high school came looking for Black students willing to join a production of “Hairspray,” a musical that concerns race relations. “To see a Black kid who is weird and loves Dungeons & Dragons and all this nerdy stuff and is highly academic and he’s not a class clown, he’s not athletic, he’s not cool, he’s just himself - that’s exactly how I felt growing up.” “To play the role of Seth as a Black person is just so emotional for me,” Cooley said. I’ve never grown out of those phases, and don’t know if I ever will.”Ĭooley, who finds echoes of his own curiosity in his character, said he also loves the way his casting might upend some stereotypes.
He collects manga, has dabbled in Dungeons & Dragons, and is especially fond of old-school Nintendo games - “your classics, like ‘Mario,’ ‘Kirby,’ ‘Legend of Zelda,’” he said. I wore anime shirts, and I was a theater kid, and I was friends with all the girls who had rainbow hair.” Here’s Cooley, defending his geek cred over the clamorous strains of Donna Summer and chiptune: “People definitely thought I was weird, because of my eccentric interests.
“This is not the path I thought I was on,” Cooley, now 19, told me over a cheat meal at a Downtown Brooklyn burger-joint-cum-video-game-parlor, 8-Bit Bites, with a retro aesthetic that a publicist suggested as the perfect setting for an interview since Cooley is an avid gamer and “Kimberly Akimbo” is set in 1999.
Cooley grabbed the role, moved to New York, and hit the aspiring-actor jackpot: The musical, “ Kimberly Akimbo,” transferred to Broadway, where he’s featured as an anagram-obsessed, Elvish-speaking, sweetly weird high school student who befriends a teenage girl braving a life-shortening genetic condition while living with a comically dysfunctional family.
Justin Cooley was just moving into a dormitory for his freshman year at Texas Christian University when he got the call: Did he want to forgo the whole college thing and instead take a role in an Off Broadway musical with a strange title and an even stranger subject?Ĭooley was an 18-year-old Kansan who had never been to New York, let alone seen a Broadway show, and he had never even worked on a stage production alongside grown-ups.īut opportunity, to quote Stephen Sondheim, is not a lengthy visitor.
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