Don’t Ask Director Jamie Lloyd How He Gets His Best Ideas

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(Bloomberg) — There’s a moment early on in Sunset Boulevard, the blockbuster production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sumptuous musical that’s about to open at the St. James Theater on Broadway, that will really blow you into the back of your seat.

No, it’s not the one you may have seen on Instagram, where the two stars of the show, Nicole Scherzinger and Tom Francis, stand solemnly on stage in their underwear, covered in blood. And no, it’s not the moment when Scherzinger, famous for her pop career with the Pussycat Dolls, holds a note for so long during the barnburning As If We Never Said Goodbye that you can barely breathe yourself. (Although that particular performance may cause you to leap to your feet in applause, if the audience at the performance I attended on Oct. 12 was any indication.)

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Instead, the instant when everything comes together in this totally new imagining of the regal Old Hollywood saga is when a giant screen swings down from the ceiling. Francis, as down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis, is fleeing from a studio lot with two goons hot on his tail. Dancers scurry and scrum around the stage, wearing black and white and trailing wisps of gloomy fog with each stomp.

Francis has been holding a camera close to his face, which is then blown up huge on the screen in cinematic fashion—a device used throughout the show. He will soon find himself on a particular street, hiding in a particular driveway. But first, the screen switches to words, proclaiming: “The Jamie Lloyd Co. Presents.” It’s as if you’ve found yourself sitting in a movie theater. And then, as the 20 piece orchestra roars, the title card appears: “SUNSET BLVD.”

Suddenly, the questions that riddle the rest of the show become clear. Are you watching a movie? A hallucination? A dream? A plan? Whatever it is, you know you’re in confident hands, with every gesture calculated to make the most intense impact possible.

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Director Jamie Lloyd, 43, is the brains behind this production, which transferred to Broadway after a 16-week run in the West End, where it won a seven Olivier awards, including ones for Francis, Scherzinger and Lloyd.

He’s off a successful run of hit shows, including Broadway’s A Doll’s House, which featured Jessica Chastain as a housewife trapped by grim circumstance, and Romeo and Juliet starring Tom Holland (aka Spider-Man) in the West End, which sold out in seconds. His Cyrano de Bergerac, which starred X-Men’s James McAvoy, won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over the years, Lloyd has honed a stripped-down aesthetic, mixing famous and unknown actors, and removing much theatrical artifice like elaborate sets, costumes and even color. He aims to distill well-known works to their root words and ideas. After Sunset, he’s directing a season of Shakespeare at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which will include The Tempest, starring Sigourney Weaver, and Much Ado About Nothing, with Tom Hiddleston (Loki) and Hayley Atwell (Captain America).

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In 2025, Lloyd will direct Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot on Broadway with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter—a duo best known for co-starring in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989.

On the week of Sunset Boulevard’s Broadway opening (Oct. 20), I spoke with Lloyd at the St. James to get his perspective on the work, his unique aesthetic and what the world can learn from Norma Desmond. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you pick Sunset Boulevard? So, obviously, the body of our work is these radical reappraisals of big canonical texts. I didn’t grow up with the knowledge of these plays. I didn’t know A Doll’s House, for example. But that’s very beneficial because it means that you see things from a different point of view. I loved musicals as a kid. My dad was a truck driver and he used to listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber in the cab of his truck.

I would be going around these kinds of industrial estates and motorways and around the UK listening to Evita and Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Jesus Christ Superstar.

Oh my God, do Joseph next.Can you imagine? That was literally the soundtrack of my childhood. And I genuinely thought I would only direct musicals, and then I ended up directing these plays. But I was always so keen to do more musical theater. I did Assassins in London, Passion at Donmar, got to know Steve Sondheim. But somehow Evita always felt like something I wanted to explore.

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And then we had done a production of that at Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, which was in 2019. And it was one of the greatest summers of my life. We wanted it to feel a little bit Coachella. It was just so exciting to take that musical—which is so associated with that original Hal Prince production, her white dress and the blond wig—and reinvent every moment.

I often say it is about pressing reset on these plays, approaching them as if they’re an entirely new piece of writing. How you reinvent these things is the thrill of it.

After Evita, I thought, “I really want to do this again.” So I was listening to The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I was addicted to that album as a child.I now regret telling anyone that this is the case because it sounds so ridiculous and so pretentious. But I literally had a dream about doing Sunset Boulevard, and I could picture some of that imagery that’s in the production. I was like, “Nicole Scherzinger from the Pussycat Dolls needs to play Norma Desmond.” Which as you can imagine is the weirdest thing to ever pop into your head.

Not weird if you’ve heard her sing Don’t Cry for Me Argentina on YouTube.That performance is incredible. I got into this deep dive on YouTube finding stuff that she had done. And it was like, “Oh wait, she can obviously really sing.” And I love musicals to be sung impeccably; there’s a little bit of a trend in the UK, especially, for the vocals to come secondary to the acting. But I feel like you can have both. And that’s the aspiration of this production.

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Everyone’s singing is impeccable.And yet they can really act. And that ensemble is incredible. Tom Francis sings an hour and 33 minutes of music.

He’s, what, 25 years old?He’s literally a kid. It’s crazy. And obviously, he can really act. I want to work with these amazing vocalists because that’s where the emotion of a musical is carried. We’ve all been in that audience where someone’s singing and you’re like, “Are they going to hit that note?” If you’re tense, you can’t truly connect.

Whereas if you feel like you’re in safe hands, then you can just give into the journey. I had met Nicole years before at the Savoy Hotel. She came downstairs, she had this big hat on, she had her sunglasses on, she had her manager, she had an assistant, she had some guy filming it for social media. And I stood there and I thought, “What am I doing? I am never going to be able to connect with this person.”

Everything that we do in rehearsal is about total trust, total collaboration, and there’s a space in which everyone’s free to be playful, and then go to the visceral depths of stuff and get messy. And I was thinking, “There’s no way this person’s going to go through this process.” And yet somehow, despite all of that, in that meeting, we connected. She’s hilarious.

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And so I reached out to her about Norma Desmond, and she was not flattered in any way. She said, “I still look good in the bright light. Why are you offering me this old has-been?” She did not get it at all. And I just said, “No, no, no. You’ve got to read the script. Don’t watch the movie. Don’t watch any bootlegs of the original production. Just get rid of anything about Norma Desmond.” 

Then she just instantly got it when she actually looked at it.

Between when I saw it in London and here, I thought she was doing more humor, more contemporary voices and gags now. Was that a choice? Maybe she’s being more playful here, but it’s an insight into her enormous delusion. She feels as if she’s a cutting-edge, TikTok influencer.

The only reason why I do theater is because, hopefully, it’s a way of learning something about myself and learning something about each other. In Sunset, what struck me was this extraordinary need for approval, this yearning to be respected and loved. And the truth is, it’s in every human interaction. You go into a deli and you order a salad and you want that person to like you. Do you know what I mean? That is what Norma Desmond’s experience is about, this idea of being this huge star, and then yearning for that validation. When you don’t get it, it’s deeply painful.

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Why is she seducing the camera? Why is she trying to befriend that audience? Because she needs the validation. So even within the humor, subtextually, there’s something deeply sad about it. When she’s rolling around the floor and doing splits, it’s hilarious and it’s impressive. But also it’s like, “Why do you feel the need to do this?”

She also doesn’t know what is real, what is not. Is it a dream in an abandoned studio? Is this emanating from her? Is this all emanating from a fractured mind? Or is it actually happening?

Do you feel like that’s extra resonant now when everybody, especially kids, are afflicted by social media?Well, it’s devastating, isn’t it? I am worried about it, because social media is feeding off that need for validation, to the point where we feel as though we’re only accepted if someone likes our post. And if we don’t, then it hurts. It’s dangerous.

You have kids, right?Yeah, I have three kids. One is 18 in December, 11 and 7. Three boys. With my young kids, their school back home in London is really hot on banning social media. I think it’s so healthy. It’s devastating to think that people might be changing their appearance, changing how they act, changing who they are to please other people.

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Is your aesthetic of “radical reappraisals” a response to what’s going on in the world? The style is an evolution from project to project. It’s also about me as a person, finding a stillness and finding a simplicity. I personally don’t own a lot of things. I am nomadic. I love traveling light.

In my work, I’m finding a connection to the music, finding a connection to the words, and an honesty and a truth and a simplicity, rather than something artificial and performative. So maybe it’s just a response to a bombardment of information, bombardment of energy. We need to find peace.

But this production, it’s minimalist, but it is not that there’s nothing there.

It’s vast, at times.It allows the audience to be co-authors in the experience. You don’t need staircases and turbans and lots of ornate scenery. The idea is that they connect more deeply because it’s not all given to them.

Every choice is intentional. It’s incredibly difficult to get that level of simplicity. You saw how precise the staging is. People only move when they need to move. Everything’s symmetrical and exact. And every shot is live. Shots that would take hours to set up on a movie, we are achieving live every night.

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You’re very good at using the smallest gesture or even a prop making a huge difference. In A Doll’s House, it was a chair, a circle, a door. In Betrayal, the silent appearance of a child. And then you’re also very good at the huge moment. When the screen comes down in this show with the Sunset Boulevard logo on it. Do you start with visuals when you’re creating those tableaux or those small moments? Is it a conversation?In this instance, it’s an imaginative response to the music, which is why I love doing musicals. Often listening to the songs, there’ll be images that come to mind, or there would be things that need to hit. So for example, there’s that moment in part two where the screen goes red. I never talk about why, because it means so many different things to so many different people. I know why it does, but also that was a very immediate reaction to listening to the music. That image came to mind.

Is that how you came up with the idea of Tom walking outside on the street while singing Sunset Boulevard?I did not have a plan for Sunset Boulevard at all. Tom Francis just got up and he sang it brilliantly, standing in the middle of the stage. And then it occurred to me, “Wait. What if you start off in your dressing room and you go around backstage. And then maybe, just as we think you’re about to go onto the stage, you go outside, and then you go out around the theater as you’re singing it.”

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And I looked behind me and there was the video team and the sound team, and they were in shock. And then every single person was just so excited about the notion that they just worked so hard to achieve it.

In this show, there’s a lot of you, there’s a lot of the Jamie Lloyd Company. The name is on the title card that appears on the big screen, it’s on the mugs that Nicole and Tom clink backstage. You are a big brand in a field where there aren’t many brand names. Is that a goal?Not intentionally. That’s just like tongue in cheek fun. Again, just playing with, “Are we here making this musical? Is this a movie? Is this a dream?”

Tell me about Waiting for Godot with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters, who were co-stars in the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure films.It was Keanu’s idea. He woke up one morning, suddenly was like, “We should do Waiting for Godot.” Then he called Alex Winter. Obviously, they’ve got this decades-long friendship. They called me, we met on Zoom. I didn’t know either of them, and I just loved them.

It’s a play I’ve always wanted to do, but I never had found the right people to do it with. It makes so much sense because of their friendship. It’s a play ultimately about friendship. This yearning for love and compassion.

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That play is very stripped down by nature. It’s going to be interesting to see what you do with it.Can you strip down the stripped down? I don’t know. It will grow from the cast and the creative team.

Why do you like to do Shakespeare so much?There are great learnings to be had from Shakespeare, great teachings, again, about the human mind, the human experience. And it’s addictive, because you have to unpick it, you have to decode it.

But we’re so used to Shakespeare being very flamboyant, with the verse being front and center. We have an idea of how it should sound. Whereas connecting to the words and speaking honestly and simply makes it make sense.

In terms of Drury Lane specifically, Andrew Lloyd Webber owns that theater. He was playing some new music one day. It was a very, very beautiful, incredible new melodies. And he stopped and looked over his piano and he was like, “I’ve always wanted to do Shakespeare at Drury Lane. Would you do it?”

That also sounds like a dream you had.I know. It was wild. I was walking past the building and the name Sigourney Weaver came into my mind and it was like, “Oh, that’s weird.” So I emailed her agents about having her play Prospero in The Tempest. And they were like, “No, she’s not done a play for so long, and she’s not done Shakespeare for 30 years.” And then I was like, “Oh, OK. It’s never going to happen.” And that night I went to bed thinking, “I wonder who else could play Prospero?” And then I woke up early the next day and there was an email saying, “Hello from Sigourney.”

Do you see an evolution of your aesthetic in the future? Do you see color in it? I think there’s definitely color. Certainly a different energy in a life and a color and a sense of fun. Right now, I don’t want to be sharing more trauma and negativity. I just don’t think we need that. I just think a bit of love and a bit of compassion and a bit of joy I think is a good thing.

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