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[0:00] Joel Crump: Today I'm here with Jak Malone. We're here for another episode of Broadway Time at Carmine's.

[0:04] Jak Malone: How are you, Joel? I'm very well. I'm very happy to be here. It's wonderful. I'm so happy to have you. It's been on my mind since we met.

[0:13] Joel Crump: Oh yeah. To have you at Carmine's and here we are. Every time we see each other we go we must get together soon.

[0:17] Jak Malone: I know. Here we are. How nice. So you've been in this show, Operation Mincemeat on Broadway, which won you a Tony and won you an Olivier. What has it been like immersing yourself in New York doing Operation Mincemeat on Broadway?

[0:26] Jak Malone: It's been so terrific. This show has been such a journey for me. I've been doing it for six years. We started at an 80-seater venue in London and now we're at an 800-seater venue here on Broadway. And it's amazing to feel that we have had this trajectory that has gotten me all the way to truly my dream place and my dream job. The thing that I most sort of looked at myself in the mirror and said this is what I want to be able to do with my life. To be able to do it and to do it with this show that I've kind of put my whole heart into is a real treat. It's like unheard of. People don't get afforded opportunities like this. It's so nice.

[1:07] Joel Crump: Yeah, absolutely. In my opinion, nothing is more New York than Carmine's.

[1:12] Jak Malone: Hey, sure. Is this your first time?

[1:12] Jak Malone: It is. It is. I'm sorry to say this is my first time in Carmine's. I'm very excited.

[1:15] Joel Crump: So you're going to get the whole Carmine's experience.

[1:17] Jak Malone: Love it. You can see the Carmine's portions.

[1:17] Joel Crump: Yeah. But we're here for the food, so let's dig in.

[1:25] Jak Malone: Okay, please. Let's do it. I love the big portion sizes.

[1:29] Jak Malone: Yeah, me too. This could feed the whole cast of Operation Mincemeat, I think. So my thing is I love a big portion size and I have always eaten like an American. I've always served myself American portions, so coming here has been very gratifying.

[1:39] Joel Crump: I'm sure. And of course the show is so physical that every time I do it I lose loads of weight, so I'm always trying to put it back on. Do you have to watch how much you eat because of how physical it is? Because I feel like my stomach would hurt doing that show.

[1:50] Jak Malone: Two show days, I have to sort of be careful about what I have in between shows because there have definitely been shows where I've gone, do you know what? I want a burrito. I'm going to get a burrito. And then I have had to do the second show and it has sat in my stomach like a stone. And it's been the hardest show to do. It's been an absolute nightmare before.

[2:10] Joel Crump: It is quite the show. I saw it obviously before opening, but in that time I feel like I see so much theatre I forget how great the shows are. So I revisited a few weeks ago and it's just so incredible.

[2:19] Jak Malone: It is such an amazing show and you five are doing so much craziness in that show, but it blows my mind. It's amazing. It blows my mind. I still am surprised every time we pull it off. You've got five of us out there. We play around 80 characters between us all. We take you all over London. We take you to Spain. A little stop off in Nazi Germany. And yeah, we sort of manage to weave this entire world and this entire rich tapestry of history in front of the audience's eyes and I love it. I think it's its very own special brand of spectacle. I know when people come to Broadway they expect big spectacle and I think we're giving it to them just not in a way that they might expect.

[3:10] Joel Crump: Oh absolutely. So talk to me more about Hester, one of the amazing characters you play. What was it like finding Hester for yourself? Obviously you've been with this show for a long time and you know that number, Dill Bill, it hits every time. What was it like finding all of that?

[3:25] Jak Malone: It was a real journey. I knew right away as soon as I read the script, I thought okay, well I know who this person is and she's one of those people, these people that I love in real life. These people who turn up at any given space, in the office, any given event and they go, I'm not here to make any friends or have any fun at all. And you meet those people and every time I meet them I think, oh don't be so stupid, of course you are. We're all here to laugh, we're all here to enjoy ourselves, don't be silly. So when you meet those people you've got to find the right thing, you've got to tickle them in the right spot and they always blossom and they always end up being really fun and really weird and really silly and it's really nice.

So I knew that's who Hester was and I thought great, I get to play her like that and let the audience go on that journey, let the audience see this person and write her off in the first scene and then watch as she reveals herself to them and you see that she is this old romantic and that she's actually just been stricken with grief for decades. And it took me a long time to realise that I'd partially based her on my grandmother who I lost in 2011 and she was one of those people, a lot of people thought that she was a little bit stern, a lot of people thought she was quite a serious person whereas I as her grandson knew her as this sort of magical person who was so fun and so sweet and kind and caring and all that lovely stuff.

So it took me a long time to realise, oh actually I think I've sprinkled a little bit of Nanny Joan into my portrayal of Hester. So it is very good when I do return to Hester to check in with that energy and keep that close every night. It's a little gift that's just for me that even I didn't know I was giving myself. It's lovely.

[5:06] Joel Crump: That's amazing. I mean you see shows and you say oh they were fantastic but you don't know what's under it all.

[5:11] Jak Malone: Truly. And even, you know, it surprised me. One day I think I was on stage and I went huh, I've just realised what I've done. I've given myself this person in small doses every night and it's a nice thing.

[5:22] Joel Crump: I love that. So from where you guys started in that 80 seat venue over to Broadway, how much has Hester changed?

[5:30] Jak Malone: She hasn't changed very much. A lot of the characters around her have changed. I was so committed to my first instincts with Hester. I just knew her straight away. She jumped off the page and I thought yeah I know who this person is. I knew this sort of clenched, held physicality. She's around military men all day so I wanted to give her her very own military pose that she falls back on. She can be standing any old way and then she hears someone bark an order and she's like well I'm also ready. So I knew I wanted to do that. The characters around her have definitely changed. Spilsbury has gotten bigger and weirder. I think by the time I got to Broadway I added this sort of twitchy, snake-like element to him which was quite fun that only sort of occurred to me as I arrived here. Everyone else has gotten a little bit stranger. Hester has gotten more real and lived in and grounded as the years have gone on.

[6:22] Joel Crump: I love that. Well this is very good so let's dig back in.

[6:30] Jak Malone: Operation Mincemeat is such a fast paced show. I feel like when I saw it I was like I have to dial in now or I am going to miss something. Talk to me about the wild stage mishaps that have happened throughout Operation Mincemeat's history. What are the wildest, funniest stories that have happened?

[6:46] Jak Malone: We've done the show so many times and as a company, as an ensemble, we're actually so honed in with each other. It's unlike any job I've ever done before where we have this shared language on stage. So oftentimes when things do go wrong, the crazy mishaps are few and far between because we are so good at cleaning up each other's messes. If we're doing one of the act one closing numbers called Just For Tonight and it's this crazy number loads of set pieces. We go all over London and then we're on a submarine and then we're back to London. It's so crazy. And we all have torches and hats in our pockets to be able to change characters. And we all know, all of us, between five of us, know the exact sound the torch makes when it lands on the floor.

You hear that and you go okay, whose torch was that? Who can pick it up? Okay, I can pick it up when I do this move. You do a move, you've got the torch. Right, now I've got this person's torch. I need to work out whose torch it is. Right, I think it's Tash's torch. Tash has her hands behind her back for one moment, you put the torch in her hands, you go like that and Tash goes like that. And we do it all the time. We fix each other's little problems and it's amazing. It's like Sherlock Holmes when you have to connect all the dots and figure out what to do. That's what we're doing. But then that isn't to say that there hasn't been some times where it's just gotten completely out of control. A recent thing for me is I was on stage and we were doing a song called Act As If during Act Two, a very serious song.

And there's a moment in that song when I'm on the edge of the stage and I go, let them believe it! And then I bolt out of the wing because I've got to get round really quick. And I was doing the show the other day and it was a little bit later in the song, I'd already done that bit, so I did Disaster awaits if they see through our shamso and bolted into the wings. I suddenly realised, no, this is absolutely not where I need to be. I've already done that bit. I'm supposed to be on stage. We're supposed to be doing a weave on the stage in and out of each other. Everyone in the wings is looking at me like, what the hell are you doing here? I turn on my heels. I run back onto the stage. By this point, the weave is already happening.

And I can't join a weave. So I just sort of walk past everybody and everyone on stage is looking at me like, are you okay? Apparently they were watching it on the monitors. The stage management thought I was having some sort of medical emergency because of how quickly I'd run off stage. But it's because I was so convinced. Yeah, I'm done. I get to go. And having done this one show for six years, things like that do happen all the time. These little surprises. That's what we like to say backstage is there's always something. It doesn't matter how many times you've done the show. There is always something that can happen where you go, okay, that's a new thing that goes wrong today. How nice. So yeah, it can be a real journey. You can get to the end of it and think, wow, I almost didn't make it. It's true. It really is.

[9:29] Joel Crump: Now beyond being on Broadway and winning a Tony Award, what have been the most exciting things about being in New York and being on Broadway?

[9:36] Jak Malone: Meeting the people, joining in and engaging with this community. It's not something I banked on being so important to me. I just thought, oh, I'm going to go there and it's going to be cool. But actually when you're in the thick of it and you're in the thick of an award season and everybody's going through it together and you're sat eating salad, steak and a trio of desserts at yet another gala next to Megan Hilty, you're all in the trenches together and we're all working really hard and we're all pushing to make this big machine happen. And I don't think London quite has it like that. There's not as much opportunity to engage. We don't have an award season like we do here. So it's being handed this whole community and having these hundreds of hands go, hey, no, don't worry, we're all going to support you and we're all here to support each other, celebrate each other, will each other to succeed.

It's just been so nice. Everywhere I go, I talk about it. I don't want anyone to think for a minute that I take it for granted. And it's part of the reason I'm really trying to stay. I'm really desperate to stay and do more work here because I don't want to leave and miss out on what the community is going to do next. I'm so excited for everybody here. I want to be around to see it.

[10:54] Joel Crump: Broadway loves you. Broadway loves the entire company of Operation Mincemeat. But audiences don't know. Award season is nuts. It is crazy on Broadway. It is like two months of just chaos. What is your favorite story or kind of thing that happened on that track where you're seeing people like Megan Hilty and Jensen Martin, all these different people that are nominated day after day?

[11:15] Jak Malone: I was doing the Tony press junket day where you go and you talk to all these different media outlets and I didn't even get to see you that day.

[11:24] Joel Crump: I know we missed you.

[11:25] Jak Malone: We missed you after it, didn't we? And as I was sort of heading to the next place, somebody took my hand and started shaking it. Before I even knew what was going on, somebody's shaking my hand. And I look and on the end of my hand is Bob Odenkirk. And he's shaking my hand and he says, hey, I'm Bob, big fan. And I went, shut up, Bob Odenkirk. I couldn't believe it. My first instinct was I told him to shut up. I said, shut up, Bob Odenkirk. I said, you don't get to just come over to me and tell me that you're a big fan. If you only knew the hours and hours I've poured into your performances, I just think he is such a skilled actor. I'm such a huge, huge fan of his work. So to have that moment, my eyes were full of tears.

I really freaked him out. I really, definitely, really badly freaked him out. I asked him for a hug, which I don't normally do unless someone's offering it. But he'd said such nice things. He'd said he was such a fan of my performance. I said, could I please give you a hug? So I gave him a hug. And then luckily, at the end of it all, Evie, our very wonderful press agent who's over there, hi. I finished that and I went to Evie and I went, oh my God, that was amazing. And she went, yeah, and look. And she'd taken pictures of the whole interaction, which meant so much to me. I did get to see him again. I saw him again at the nominees luncheon and I went over and sat next to him and I had a normal, civilized, polite conversation.

I wanted him to know that I wasn't, that I wanted him to know that I had some chill because yeah, it was one of the wildest moments of my life. And I'm so glad that it was captured so I can look back and go, wow, yeah, that was, that was really cool.

[13:02] Joel Crump: That's the best story. That is so funny. Oh my God, it's Bob Odenkirk. What did you say? Shut up. Shut up Bob Odenkirk. That's all I had in me. That's the best.

[13:11] Jak Malone: So my last question for you is if you could send a message to Jak six years ago or 10 years ago before all of this happened, what would you tell him?

[13:20] Jak Malone: I would say you confident little menace. You were right. To be here doing this is, um, is a joy. And as I say, not one I take for granted and I'm trying to string it out as long as I can. Um, but yeah, it's, it's wonderful. I, I don't think I will ever get over it.

[13:46] Joel Crump: Cannoli. Cannoli. Oh my goodness. No. Okay. Perfect. Okay. That's all good. Yeah. Got to end that meal with some cannoli.

[13:54] Jak Malone: I think so. Yes. Oh sure. Thank you. Nice. Thank you.

[14:04] Joel Crump: Thank you so much. Absolutely. Do you want to just grab one? Yeah. I just say we just go in. Let's just dig in. Wow. All right. Cheers. Cheers. Cannoli cheers. This way.

[14:19] Jak Malone: That's incredible. That is so nice. That is a nice, rich, creamy cannoli. Well, thank you so much Jak. I'm so glad after all these months, we finally made it to doing something else off of the red carpet.

[14:32] Jak Malone: Me too. And I'm so glad you came. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's such a joy.

[14:36] Joel Crump: Absolutely. Should we end on a cannoli? I think, I think we should end on another bite of this cannoli. Cannoli cheers. Cheers.