Ryan McCartan and China Anne McClain Promise Their Glitzy Version of Broadway’s “The Great Gatsby” Is ‘Never Boring’ (Exclusive)

The show marks McClain’s Broadway debut, while McCartan is on his third contract as the title character

NEED TO KNOW

• Ryan McCartan and China Anne McClain are currently starring as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in Broadway’s The Great Gatsby
• The two tell PEOPLE how they’ve crafted their roles to play off each other and the audience
• This marks McClain’s Broadway debut; it is McCartan’s third contract with the show

Ryan McCartan and China Anne McClain are bringing their own flair to the stage in Broadway’s The Great Gatsby.

The two are currently starring as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, respectively, in the production playing at the Broadway Theatre and based on the novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though it’s McCartan’s third contract as Gatsby, he tells PEOPLE that his interpretation of the character is always evolving.

“I was leaning a lot on charm and social and emotional sleight of hand, if you will, to obfuscate the near sociopathic desire that this man had to achieve his means,” McCartan, 33, explains of how he originally played the character when he stepped into the role in January 2025, after Jeremy Jordan initially departed the production. “I don’t do that anymore. Now it’s like the mystique of him is the story. The mystique of him is the money. The mystique of him is the scale. I don’t need to hide behind charm.”

In the classic story, Gatsby and Daisy are former lovers who are separated by the war after he ships off. They meet again years later — after Daisy has moved on and married someone else, not knowing that Gatsby had survived. Meanwhile, all this time, Gatsby remained focused on making a name for himself to be worthy of Daisy, hoping to one day win her love for good.

Describing his character, McCartan notes Gatsby is in a constant state of obsession with his endgame, always feeling the pressure of getting what he wants. It carries through in his demeanor, mannerisms and tone.

“As the titular role of the show, usually there’s an arc,” he explains. “But when it’s all pressure all the time, there’s no arc. It’s Daisy at the beginning, it’s Daisy at the middle, it’s Daisy at the end. I don’t experience that narrative throughline. The first thing I sing is Daisy, and the last thing I sing is Daisy. And it’s Daisy in between.”

The Wicked alum calls it an “embarrassment of riches” to be able to change up his character based on the cast he’s sharing the stage with, which currently includes McClain as his Daisy.

In her Broadway debut in the role, McClain has embraced each little piece that makes Daisy the type of character that you love to hate and hate to love. McClain tells PEOPLE that she long felt that Daisy was a character who was underdeveloped in the original text, as well as in the movies based on the novel.

“I wanted my version of Daisy to be really open so that people could see her,” she says. “Even if she was openly putting on, even if she was openly like, ‘No, everything’s fine,’ when things were not fine, I wanted her to be almost like an open wound.”

The Descendants alum, 28, notes that she plays her Daisy with a bit of an “edge,” bringing some sass to the role.

“In her character description too that [production] sent me with this show, it said that she was secretly brilliant,” McClain adds. “I wanted there to be hints of that as well and show that she is funny and lively and alive and not just a prop.”

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Perhaps one of the most significant characteristics of McClain’s Daisy is one that she has no control over: the color of her skin. As the actress tells it, she’s well aware that she “wouldn’t have made sense” as the real Daisy or even as an actress playing Daisy in the early 1920s when the story takes place.

“It’s a beautiful thing that we can do with art,” she says of being a Black star on Broadway. “We can go back in time and change history to be more of what it should have been in the first place. I feel like I can be myself and I don’t have to change it because of the time this book was based on.”

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With each show, McCartan and McClain mold their characters around each other in new ways. McCartan shares that while he took a few days away from the show for another project, McClain adjusted slight nuances to the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby with the understudies who went on. Upon his return, he was excited to see she’d injected subtle moments between the lovers that had never been done before.

“It is constantly amorphous,” McCartan says of the ever-evolving show and of theater as a whole. “Speaking for me as someone who is ADHD anthropomorphized, I need the change. I can’t be bored. And it’s never boring. It’s all of those little nuances that only you, only me, only he, only she, only they could bring to the story their way. That’s why theater is the best.”

For McClain, the beauty of live theater is that it thrives in its connection with the audience and the storytelling, including all its imperfections.

“There’s really no way to understand theater until you do it,” McClain says of learning the ropes on her first Broadway gig. “One thing that I’m really enjoying about this medium is that vocally sounding good — which is what I’ve always thought about — it’s not useful for that to be the priority here. Because when that is the main thing that you’re thinking about, it can disconnect you from telling the story and including the audience and having an experience with them as opposed to just having your own experience and being inside of yourself the whole time.”

She reveals that in these first few weeks of shows, she’s teaching herself to let go of perfection and exist in the moment. That means “not prioritizing sounding perfect” and instead telling Daisy’s story to the audience.

“This is not a concert,” McCartan adds. “It is a story. This is live. It is incumbent on it to be imperfect. That’s the point. The stories are imperfect stories. The Great Gatsby’s not a perfect story.”

The show also stars Corbin Bleu as Nick Carraway, John Behlmann as Tom Buchanan, Linedy Genao as Myrtle Wilson, Charlie Pollock as George Wilson and Matthew Saldívar as Meyer Wolfsheim.

The musical — with a score of songs by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, a book by Kait Kerrigan and direction by Marc Bruni — premiered at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2023, where it became the highest-grossing production in the theater’s history before transferring to Broadway in 2024. It has played over 900 performances on Broadway and sold more than 1 million tickets.

Tickets for The Great Gatsby are now on sale.

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