The Role of Her Life (So Far)
Actor Sydney Lemmon was struggling to find work in early 2022. Then she auditioned to play an unhinged tech worker in therapy, and rediscovered her identity
Photos by Chris Sorensen
The Role of Her Life (So Far)
Actor Sydney Lemmon was struggling to find work in early 2022. Then she auditioned to play an unhinged tech worker in therapy, and rediscovered her identity
There are moments when New York City shrinks from a metropolis of eight million humans to “a tiny little town,” Sydney Lemmon says. The actor experienced one such moment early last summer in the city she calls home. She’d recently learned that the play she was starring in off Broadway, JOB, was moving from the 200-seat Connelly Theater to the 600-seat Helen Hayes Theater on 44th Street for its Broadway debut. The role would be the biggest yet for Lemmon (’12), who says she was in the middle of an acting dry spell when she read for the part of Jane, a woman seeing a therapist for a mental health crisis after losing her job as an online content moderator. Before rehearsals began for the Broadway show, which premiered in July 2024, Lemmon took a walk to the Hayes Theater.
As she stood across from the Hayes thinking about the beautiful chaos that was about to consume her life, a memory came to her: Her late grandfather—Oscar-winning actor Jack Lemmon—had performed on a stage nearby in the 1986 Eugene O’Neill revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a role for which he earned a Tony nomination. Lemmon looked the show up in the Playbill archives and discovered that the Broadhurst Theatre, where her grandfather had starred, was directly across the street from the Hayes.
“In that moment, I felt like my grandpa was right there with me,” Lemmon says. “I’d be across the street doing my show, and I know that would have made him so very proud.” JOB wrapped at the end of October 2024. “When an actor gets an opportunity like this, it can feel like, oh, God, I’ve been fighting for this for so long. It can be overwhelming. To have a special moment like that, to feel my grandfather’s presence, it was like a little gift from him, saying, I’ve got your back. I did it; you can at least try.”
“EDUCATION IS THE THROUGH LINE”
Jack Lemmon may have been a Hollywood icon, but his granddaughter has made her own way into the entertainment business. Born in Los Angeles into an acting family—her parents, Chris and Gina, and brother Jon have played a number of roles on stage and screen—Lemmon was raised in Connecticut from the age of eight.
“If I felt any pressure, it was probably to stay out of the business,” Lemmon says, acknowledging the difficulty of breaking through amid a culture of constant rejection. She adds that her parents and grandfather, who died in 2001 at 76, “would have encouraged me to do just about anything other than this.”
But participating in plays in high school convinced Lemmon she didn’t want to do anything else. As a senior at CFA, she played Lala Levy in Alfred Uhry’s comedy The Last Night of Ballyhoo and found out what it was like to make an audience laugh. “It was the first time all the elements of my training were really working together,” Lemmon says. “And when you feel that magic onstage, and feel that what you are doing is connecting with an audience, you never want to stop.”
Lemmon says CFA taught her how to be an artist, find her confidence and voice, collaborate, and feel at home on stage in her five-foot-ten frame. After graduation, Lemmon toured for nine months with National Players, a non-Equity company that performs classic works by writers like Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Kafka. But she knew she wasn’t finished learning the craft. She entered Yale’s lauded MFA acting program, graduating in 2017.
“It was education that has been the through line for me with acting, more so than any pressure that I would have felt from my family,” she says.
THE JOB OF HER LIFE
By the time she read the script for JOB, Lemmon had hit a roadblock in her acting career. She’d acted in an independent film or two, and played a few television roles and a handful of higher-profile characters—notably, the title role of Ana Helstrom in Hulu’s single-season Marvel adaptation of Helstrom. She appeared in two episodes of HBO’s Succession in a short-lived fling with Jeremy Strong’s character, Kendall Roy. By early 2022, though, the new work was drying up. Then she read the script for JOB, a winding and at times dark story by first-time playwright Max Wolf Friedlich, with a directing and production team full of Broadway newcomers. Lemmon was immediately drawn to Jane, a character who’d had a breakdown at work and who confronts her therapist, Loyd.
Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman in a 2023 production of JOB at New York’s SoHo Playhouse, where the show premiered. Sara Krulwich/the New York Times/Redux
“I read JOB,” she says, “and I didn’t know any of the people producing it. There was no actor attached to play the role of Loyd. And honestly, the way my luck was going, I knew I had to fight tooth and nail to get the part, but I felt I could bring a real truth to this character. I felt a strong, strong connection with the role, and I knew that if I got the opportunity to take it on, I would be lucky—even if nobody saw the play. It would be an enormous workout as an actor, and that was just what I needed.”
I felt a strong, strong connection with the role, and I knew that if I got the opportunity to take it on, I would be lucky.
Lemmon got the part. Then she learned Loyd would be played by Broadway legend Peter Friedman, who picked up a Tony for best actor in 1998 for his part in the revival of Ragtime. More recently, he memorably portrayed Frank Vernon in Succession.
“I thought, if an actor of Peter’s caliber is willing to come on board with this, people might actually come,” Lemmon says.
That they did. And they loved it. Lemmon and Friedman’s bizarre therapy sessions helped sell out all 170 seats at the SoHo Playhouse, which led to the theater extending JOB’s run (for another sellout). In early 2024, the play moved to the 200-seat Connelly Theater, where available tickets were again scarce during the play’s eight shows per week. That’s when Lemmon got the news that JOB was headed to the Hayes Theater, a 600-seat Broadway playhouse.
“Because lightning had struck so many times, I can’t say I was completely taken by surprise,” Lemmon admits. “But if you had told me that when I first read the script in March 2022, I would have said there’s no chance. That it was an impossibility.”
Lemmon poured everything into JOB—a New York Times critic’s pick—and says that for months, it was nothing but Epsom salt baths, steam for her vocal cords, tea with honey, and the social life of a monk. It was a sacrifice that Lemmon, who considers herself a stage actress first and foremost, is willing to make.
“The heights are just as high, especially when you get to talk to somebody at the stage door who says, ‘You made me feel seen,’” Lemmon says.
What’s next for Lemmon? She plays a struggling designer in The Philosophy of Dress, an independent film about the underbelly of New York’s fashion scene, which she shot between JOB’s first and second runs off-Broadway. The film, which she produced as well, is set for 2026. In the meantime, she continues to read scripts for new acting work. She says playing Jane on Broadway has made her a bit more discriminating in the roles she considers. “I just took the ride of my life with JOB,” she says. “If a character speaks to me, whether it’s on stage, in a TV show, or a movie, that’s the thing I really care about.”
