Former NYU Tisch student Nihar Duvvuri did not have a theater program in his high school — his only acting at that time were 10-minute performances for the speech and debate club in high school. He is now making his Broadway debut in the show “Romeo and Juliet.”
The show — which opens on Broadway today — has amassed over $3.4 million from 4 weeks of previews and will run until Feb. 16, 2025. Duvvuri joins starring actors Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler on stage as he plays the role of Balthazar, Romeo’s friend and servant, and also as the understudy for Romeo. One day, Duvvuri hopes to channel his passion for performance into telling South Asian stories through film.
In an interview with WSN, Duvvuri discussed preparing for the Broadway stage, telling Indian American stories on screen and pursuing both acting and directing in the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: How did your experience at NYU impact you as an artist?
Duvvuri: It taught me a lot about my creative process. In high school, I had really formed an identity — both personally and creatively — that was just very unaffected by others. By working with all these different directors at NYU, it forced me to explore other parts of my identity that I hadn’t before. That might have been one of the biggest lessons that I took hold of at the core to my artistic identity while I was at NYU — using art as a way to investigate life and explore the human condition.
Duvvuri began studying at NYU in 2022 at the Tisch School of the Arts’ Atlantic Acting School. He decided to drop out of the university last school year to pursue acting full-time, although he said that he is undecided on whether he will eventually complete his degree.
After leaving NYU, Duvvuri started rehearsing for “Romeo and Juliet” in August and is also the understudy for the male lead. The production is a modern adaption of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, featuring critically-acclaimed performers and complete with music by Grammy Award-winning producer Jack Antonoff.
WSN: What has your experience been like in the cast of “Romeo and Juliet?”
Duvvuri: I’m so creatively fulfilled by this project. It has such an interesting take on our generation’s pain and the grief that we are undergoing while we inherit this world. It’s really poignant. I think that Sam Gold, our director, is so good at articulating why this project is the way that it is. Because Romeo and Juliet has been done hundreds of times, every new production of it needs to have a reason for why they’re doing it this specific way. We found that reason, so I feel really happy about it. I am such good friends with the cast, too. It just feels like going and hanging out with people and coming home. It’s wonderful.
Duvvuri’s acting career began in eighth grade, a time when he took classes at a studio in San Jose, CA and where he met his mentor Vijay Vanniarajan, whom Duvvuri credits as an influential figure in his life after rarely seeing other Indian actors on screen growing up. In high school, Duvvuri used the speech and debate club as an outlet for acting — he put on 10-minute performances to condense the plots of books and movies in competitions, an experience which he said sparked his love of preparing for a show.
He also said that he created a few short films as a teenager, including a magical realist work titled “The Boy & the River” that features an Indian main character. Duvvuri said that recent popular works that star South Asian characters, including the Netflix show “Never Have I Ever” and the film “Slumdog Millionaire,” place cultural identity as their characters’ only defining feature.
WSN: How do you hope to change how South Asian stories are told?
Duvvuri: I hope to one day open a production house that caters to telling South Asian stories, or at least uplifting minority voices within the media. The way people are represented in the media is very reflective of the American psyche. Any way we can change media representation directly affects psyche, however subconsciously, it still does in major ways. I want to see Indian people in completely normal roles where they don’t even necessarily have to be Indian. They’re just Americans living lives. It’s not about culture necessarily. I really want to make people see the universality of these stories — less so the cultural aspects of it, which are wonderful and very specific and close and dear to me, but they’re not necessarily the exact stories I want to be telling right now.
Duvvuri said that while he does not know what his next project will be after “Romeo and Juliet,” he hopes to finish writing some of his screenplays and apply to fellowships and residency programs. He said that he eventually hopes to use his inspiration from artists such as actor Paul Mescal and filmmaker Christopher Nolan to both act in and direct his own independent feature films.
WSN: How do you think your artistic approach has changed since the beginning of your career?
Duvvuri: I did acting because I liked it — that is the biggest thing I noticed when I started acting. I was passionate about it, and I enjoyed acting, and I would just do things that I liked, but now I found a deeper purpose within acting: to investigate life more deeply and understand myself more deeply. Actor Ian McKellen read this letter by Kurt Vonnegut really beautifully, and he said everyone should practice any art, no matter what it is — music, painting, acting, dancing — not to find money or fame, but to experience becoming. He said it was to make your soul grow, and I’ve been experiencing that side of things more deeply in recent years. That has been a big change from how I started out versus now.
Contact Rory Lustberg at [email protected].