Featured image: (Pacer graphic / Darby Self)

We like to freeze our celebrities in amber: the golden boy, the heartthrob, the ingénue.

With Chess, Aaron Tveit steps into something messier, uglier and braver. He lets us watch him come apart. In doing so, he proves that “golden” was never about being flawless—it was about surviving the tarnish.

I have spent a lot of my life afraid of getting stuck in amber, too. Not on a Broadway stage, obviously, but behind a laptop.

As a student journalist, it is absurdly easy to become “the opinions kid,” or “the one who always writes about X.” People love tidy labels. They make us predictable, digestible and easy to file away, so that people can look to us for a certain type of content. And once you realize people see you that way, it is tempting to stay there. If you never break the mold, you never risk failure outside it.

Watching Aaron Tveit in Chess—and looking back at how he got there—has felt like watching someone refuse to stay frozen.

For years, Tveit has been branded Broadway’s golden boy: the charming lead with the million-watt smile and the high tenor notes, the guy who looks like he was grown in a lab to play romantic leads and tragic dreamers. A 2014 Hollywood Reporter profile even described him as someone who keeps “turning heads playing golden boys with a dark side.”

That image stuck, even as his résumé kept complicating it. Onstage, he’s originated roles like Gabe in Next to Normal, Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can and, most famously, Christian in Moulin Rouge! The Musical—the performance that finally won him a Tony Award. Onscreen, he’s been the pretty boy with secrets in everything from Gossip Girl to Les Misérables and Schmigadoon!

But if you zoom out, his career does not actually look “safe.” In recent years he has leaned into darker, thornier material: stepping into Sweeney Todd’s blood-spattered boots in 2024, a move he admitted “definitely” scared him. In another interview, he and Sutton Foster talked about how they do not want to be “boxed in by what they are known for,” even as they took on roles—Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett—that seemed like the opposite of their reputations.

Meanwhile, I catch myself doing the opposite.

When I introduce myself, I almost always lead with the neat version: I am a journalism major, opinions editor, fangirl extraordinaire. That is the quick elevator pitch. That is the “poster version” of me. It leaves out the nights I stare at a Google Doc and wonder if I am capable of writing anything that actually shows that I deserve my position as opinions editor. It leaves out the fear that if I try something new—investigative work, longform narrative, deeply personal essays—I will prove that I am only good inside the narrow lane I have already paved.

Which is why Chess hits me so hard.

In the current Broadway revival of Chess at the Imperial Theatre, Tveit plays Freddie Trumper, the volatile American chess champion locked in a Cold War rivalry with Nicholas Christopher’s Anatoly and Lea Michele’s Florence. On paper, Freddie is the last person you would cast the “nice guy” as: loud, abrasive and self-sabotaging.

Tveit clearly knows that. In a recent Ticketmaster interview, he described Freddie as brash and narcissistic, a brilliant player who loves his own fame but is haunted by mental-health struggles and a traumatic childhood that left him without any real support as he became famous at 11. That framing shows up in his performance: the swagger is there, but it is always hiding something brittle.

Vocally, Chess gives him plenty of chances to do what audiences already know he can. The revival’s reviews keep circling back to the show’s “blow-your-hair-back” 1980s rock ballads and the amplified power of its three leads; one Washington Post critic even called the score “packed with bangers” and said Tveit, Michele and Christopher might have “shattered” any glass near the theater.

But it is “Pity the Child” that changes the conversation.

Theatre critic Joey Sims wrote that Tveit delivers a “masterful ‘Pity the Child’ and a deliciously sexy ‘One Night in Bangkok,’” in a revival that otherwise still leans more concert than cohesive drama. You can feel why that song stands out. It is one of the most demanding male solos in the musical theater canon, a marathon of range and emotion. Tveit does not treat it like a vocal trophy. He lets it get ugly.

Notes fray. The posture collapses. The confident Freddie we have watched swagger through press conferences suddenly looks like a kid who never got over being left behind—and does not know how to be loved without performing for it.

There is something almost uncomfortable about watching an actor we have coded as “perfect” lean into being pathetic, petty and broken. But that is exactly the point. Tveit uses every ounce of golden-boy capital to show us a man who has absolutely no idea how to hold himself together anymore.

By the time Freddie blows up his own world, it does not feel like random chaos. It feels inevitable. And it feels, painfully, human.

Here is the part where Broadway collides with journalism for me.

On paper, these worlds could not be more different: one is bright lights and overtures, the other is Google Docs and deadlines. But both are, at their core, about storytelling—and about what happens when people decide you are only “allowed” to tell one kind of story.

I have felt that pressure more intensely the further I get into my journalistic career. I am the opinions editor, so I must always have a take.

And honestly? Sometimes I lean into it because it is safe.

If I write the kind of story everyone already expects from me, odds are it will be decent. It might even be good. But it will not stretch, scare or force me to be anything more than the version of myself people have already decided on.

Watching Tveit choose Freddie—this jagged, self-sabotaging, deeply uncomfortable role—feels like a reminder that staying in that box is a choice, not a sentence.

He could have coasted on being the romantic lead forever. He could have waited for the next suave boyfriend role or the next “nice guy with a dark edge” that still leaves him essentially unchallenged. Instead, he signed on to a show critics still describe as structurally messy but musically thrilling, a cult musical that keeps getting “fixed” without ever truly settling down.

It is a risk.

But art does not move if nobody is willing to risk.

Neither does a career.

If a Broadway actor can take the image that made him marketable and smudge it on purpose—if he can sing his guts out as a character who is more wound than charm—then surely I can pitch a story that does not sound like anything I have written before. Surely I can sit with a piece that feels too raw, too personal, too different from what people expect, and write it anyway.

The longer I think about Chess, the more I realize that what inspires me is not just Tveit’s performance. It is the trajectory it represents.

Every role before this one did not trap him; it prepared him. The pretty parts, the broody parts, the morally conflicted parts—all of them built a foundation strong enough that he could afford to shatter it a little. The very thing that made him “golden” gives him the freedom to go darker now.

And the industry is noticing. Chess has already shown up on year-end lists celebrating Broadway’s most interesting work of 2025—lists that emphasize substance and bold storytelling over safe star vehicles. In other words: he isn’t just being rewarded for being shiny. He is being recognized for taking a risk.

That is the part I am trying to remember when I feel boxed in by my own clips and bylines.

All the work I have done so far—every opinion piece, every arts review, every feature—does not mean I am stuck in that mode forever. It means I have built enough trust, enough skill, enough muscle memory, that I can afford to take bigger swings. To write the scary story. To cover a beat that is not “my usual.” To let my voice be sharper, messier, more vulnerable.

Broadway and journalism may be completely different industries, but the influence of both is the same: they shape how people see themselves and the world. They teach us whose stories matter, which risks are rewarded, and what it looks like to change in public.

With Chess, Tveit changes in public. He lets us see the tarnish on the gold and does not rush to polish it away. As someone still figuring out who I am on the page, that feels like permission.

Permission to take up space outside the label.

Permission to write toward the edges of what I have done before.

Permission to be seen trying, and sometimes failing, at something new.

We may never stop trying to freeze our favorites in amber. But watching Tveit crack his own casing open onstage makes me want something different for myself—and for everyone else building a life in the arts, or the newsroom, or anywhere people love easy labels.

Maybe “golden” was never meant to mean “perfect.”

Maybe it just means you keep going, even when the shine wears off.