Sydney Lemon
(Photos by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)
Age: 33
Native city: Glastonbury, Connecticut
Current role: Sydney Lemmon stars in Max Wolf Friedlich’s JOB as Jane, a tech company employee who was fired after experiencing a mental health crisis at work. She appears in the two-character play alongside Peter Friedman. Michael Herwitz directs.
Credits: Lemmon made her Broadway debut understudying the role of Rebecca in Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman. Her television credits include Fear the Walking Dead, Succession, Helstrom, The Good Fight and Evil. She has also appeared in the films Velvet Buzzsaw, Firestarter and Tár.
Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman in “JOB” (Photo: Emilio Madrid)
It’s in the genes!
Lemmon spent the early years of her life in Hollywood, California, where her father, Chris Lemmon, was a working actor. Much of her family also lived there, including her grandfather, legendary Oscar-winning actor Jack Lemmon, known for films such as Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. “As a kid, I was very close to my grandfather,” Lemmon says. “My mom and dad would tell me stories about when I was a kid and make him laugh hysterically, doing little things that kids do. He would say, ‘It’s in the genes! It’s in the genes!’” Seeking a change of pace, the family moved east after Lemmon’s two younger siblings were born, closer to her mother Gina Raymond’s family. “We went from city life to a small rural town in Connecticut.”
Brahms, Baltimore and Butterworth
“My father is a classical pianist, so I was very lucky to grow up with beautiful music all the time,” Lemmon says. She remembers “listening to music at night or before dinner, filling the house,” and cites Brahms, Ravel and Rachmaninoff as some of the first artists to impact her senses. Naturally, watching movies was a central family pastime. And then there were the cast albums: “I listened to the Hairspray album—I mean, I think that thing broke in my boombox.” The list goes on: “Spring Awakening: CD broken. Les Miz: CD broken.” Living within driving distance of New York also put her close to reality. “I have memories of coming into the city to see plays that would completely blow me away,” she says. Mark Rylance struck her as an “Olympic athlete” in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. And Nina Arianda’s Tony-winning performance in David Ives’s Venus in Fur left a lasting impression: “When I saw that play, I thought, ‘This is how you act.’”
School days
For Lemmon, acting was not so much a pursuit of the family craft as, as she describes it, “following my pleasure.” She enrolled in a specialized high school where she could divide her time between traditional academics and arts education. “I was better at plays than I was at algebra and physics, and I just really liked it.” She earned her BFA from Boston University in 2012, followed by an MFA from Yale in 2017. “It’s really been a love of education,” she says of her acting journey, one that embraced technique and craft. A lesson from director Robert Woodruff in her first year at Yale still informs her work: “Go slower than you think is possible or faster than you think is possible. Nothing in between.” The takeaway was not polished acting, but a sense of possibility. “There’s no right way to do it.” “Strive to try something in a different way,” he recites like a mantra. “It’s a class I’ve been thinking about almost daily while doing JOB on Broadway.”
Sydney Lemmon as Jane in “JOB” on Broadway
(Photo: Emilio Madrid)
A debut on Parisian Broadway
Lemmon’s first job out of college was a nine-month stint on a non-equity national tour of Romeo and Juliet, playing Benvolio and Lady Capulet. “After that, I spent a year waitressing in Brooklyn and trying to get parts.” Graduate school gave her a break from the grind, and in 2017, with her new degree in hand, she landed her Broadway debut as the understudy to Phillipa Soo in The Parisian Woman, a Beau Willimon play that starred (in addition to Soo) Uma Thurman, Blair Brown, Josh Lucas, and Marton Csokas. “I was very lucky to be the understudy to someone like Pippa,” Lemmon says, recalling her first Broadway experience. “She put me in a dress on opening night. She was incredibly kind, and I was lucky to be able to learn from someone like that.” The play ran for four months at the Hudson Theatre, and Lemmon spent that time soaking up all the wisdom she could. “I had the chance to ride it a couple of times and feel the thrill. It was a truly magical experience.”
“Maybe people will go see this play”
Lemmon was cast in JOB before Peter Friedman signed on as the Lloyd to her Jane. Quick to gush about her prolific co-star, she calls him “the greatest gift to off-Broadway” and, with a nod to her childhood awash in cast albums, insists, “How could you not love him in Ragtime?” She and Friedman had crossed paths in Scotland while filming HBO’s Succession — Friedman was a series regular and Lemmon a guest star. But with no scenes together, all Lemmon could do was admire him from afar (“I remember walking past him in a hotel,” she says, summing up the extent of their interaction). When playwright Max Wolf Friedlich later called Lemmon to tell him that Friedman was the actor he had his eye on for the Soho Playhouse premiere of JOB in 2023, he had two thoughts: “Oh shit, I really need to step up,” followed by, “So maybe people will go see this play.”
A great Broadway experiment
“What surprised us the most was putting this play before the first audience,” Lemmon says, recalling how she and Friedman were stunned with laughter. “We thought, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” The pair had rehearsed the play in earnest, shaping the tenuous back-and-forth between a woman torn apart by her career and the crisis therapist charged with mending her fragile psyche. Audiences reveled in the dark humor at its cracks. “It’s exciting to see people have a little more leeway to have their buttons pushed,” she says, having played Jane in three different venues. “I think it’s been a great experiment.” JOB’s organic groundswell led to a second off-Broadway run at the Connelly Theatre and now a Broadway run at the Hayes Theatre scheduled for late September. “We didn’t realize there was an appetite for a play like this on Broadway, and it’s absolutely amazing to see that there is.”
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