Steve Kazee
Steve Kazee is an actor, born 1975.
A Tony Award for a musical is a hard thing to convert into a screen career, and Steve Kazee's record shows why. He began working professionally in the mid-2000s and appeared in a run of Broadway productions between 2005 and 2013, including Spamalot and 110 in the Shade, before Once. He won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for playing Guy in it.
Once is a hard show to carry. It is built on quiet, on a musician who has stopped wanting things, and the production depends on a lead who can hold a room without pushing. The band is on stage, the singing is live, and the performance has to work as music and as acting simultaneously, which is a narrower needle than most musical leads are asked to thread.
Television followed and has been less generous. His most substantial screen role is Gus Pfender in the fifth season of Shameless, a musician who turns up inside the Gallagher household, which is a sensible use of a singer who can act. Curtis Ballard in Legends and Nick Garrett in the short-lived Working Class fill out the network attempts, and the films here, Tempting Fate and The Grotto, are modest. He went back to the theatre in 2018 as Edward in the Chicago tryout of Pretty Woman: The Musical.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Steve Kazee
There is a problem with this list, and it is worth stating first: the performance that defines him, the one that won the Tony, happened on a stage and is not a filmed credit, so nothing available here is really representative.
Given that, Shameless is the start. His fifth-season arc as Gus is the best screen work on offer, and it lands in a genuinely strong stretch of a show that was still at full power. Legends comes next, a spy series that is watchable and not much more, and Working Class is an early sitcom that came and went. The two films, Tempting Fate and The Grotto, are small and best saved until after the television. If a recording or a touring production of Once ever crosses your path, that is the actual answer.