When Jake Epstein moved to New York City 14 months ago, he had no clue that he would soon be swooping around the Broadway stage as Spider-Man.
In that debut performance, the 26-year-old Toronto-born actor donned the iconic red and blue spandex suit and starred in the most expensive musical production of all time: Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
But now, less than a year later, he’s taking off that suit and heading to something with a little more gravity: Beautiful, a musical based on the life of songwriting legend Carole King, played by Jessie Mueller.
“It’s about this factory of songwriters… all these Brooklyn Jews that started writing every single hit in America at the time,” said Epstein, who plays King’s songwriting partner and first husband, Gerry Goffin.
Goffin, who was inducted with King into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, wrote a slew of hits with her, including chart-toppers Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow and The Loco-Motion.
He has always been a very private man, partly due to his mental health issues including bipolar disorder, which at the time was not widely understood. That made it a little difficult for Epstein to learn how to act like him.
“There are no YouTube clips of Gerry Goffin,” Epstein said. “A lot of my research came from conversations with the writers, who had spent a lot of time with Gerry.”
That’s how Epstein learned how to emulate Goffin’s mannerisms, both in terms of how he spoke and how he moved.
Epstein called it a very strange experience to be part of the creation of a character based on someone who is still alive. He said he was nervous knowing that Goffin was going to see the show, and specifically requested that no one tell him which day Goffin was planning to attend.
“I was really worried about the way the play was interpreting this guy who is really alive,” he said.
Goffin did attend a show when it was playing in San Francisco for a month prior to moving to the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on Broadway, and he called it exhilarating.
“While it’s not quite me, I think Jake does a good job of capturing the essence of what I was going through at that time,” he told The CJN.
But it’s not quite accurate.
“Jake has more class in the show than I ever had,” he said.
Epstein is no stranger to playing people with mental illness. One of his most famous roles was when he played Craig Manning, a musician with bipolar disorder, in Degrassi: The Next Generation.
Although he worried a little about being typecast in roles that involve mental illness, he said he realized the disorder was set in a completely different context, and he’s approaching it in a very different way.
“When I shot those first episodes in Degrassi… I didn’t know what bipolar was at the time, and I was learning about it,” he said. “To go back to something I’d done a little research on as a teenager, as an adult on Broadway, it felt like looking at it from a different lens.”
Epstein said although Beautiful is completely different from Spider-Man, there were still lessons he was able to take away from his experience there.
“Talk about what a way to get your feet wet on Broadway, to play the main part in the most expensive, biggest musical ever. Nothing will ever be bigger or scarier than that,” he said. “That was a huge confidence builder for me to know I could carry a show.”
He also learned what it takes to do a long run of a show, with eight performances every week.
Although it’s a tough gig, he said the show is a really good fit for him, and it’s an incredible feeling to be performing on Broadway.
“My whole experience here has been such a dream,” he said. “It’s so exciting and so unexpected. I feel like I was meant to be here.”
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is in its preview run until its official opening on Jan. 12.