At the opening night of 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' on Broadway, Alex Breaux tells THR how much inspiration he took from the show to create a younger version of Dr. Brenner for the play. Plus he dishes on participating in the scenes with special effects.
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00:00It's opening night. How are we feeling? What's going through our minds?
00:04We are feeling good. This is a culmination of a thousand people working their butts off for six days a week, 12 hours a day, for three months.
00:13Not to mention, we're standing on the shoulders of the show from London in a workshop they did prior to even starting rehearsals in New York.
00:19We have a lot of people from Netflix, a lot of cast members from the TV show here tonight.
00:25So we're all super excited to kind of share the show with them, and we want to knock it out of the park.
00:30Sure, for sure. And I know that Matthew Modine played Dr. Brenner in the series.
00:35How much influence did you take from him when crafting this character, and how much did you kind of just want to break away and do your own thing?
00:41Yeah, two things. I mean, I definitely went back and watched his performance and looked at his essence and the maturity and the level-headedness and the humanity he lent the character,
00:50and also the complication of the character. And also it was an inquiry on who we are in different stages of our life.
00:57I'm playing him, you know, 25 years, 27 years younger, maybe before he's learned the lessons he's learned and, you know, shows off in the TV show.
01:06So I would say I'm a little maybe more transgressive at times, maybe a little less under control of my emotions or less able to predict how my experiments will go,
01:16and at times overreach. So I think you'll see some new flavors of Dr. Brenner, and that would be of a slightly younger man who's ambitious and hasn't maybe had as many reps under his belt as a scientist, as many trials under his belt.
01:31For sure. Have you been able to have any conversations with Matthew ahead of this or maybe looking forward to meeting him tonight?
01:37I'm really looking forward to it. I don't know if he's here tonight, but yeah, I'm really looking forward to meeting him because as an actor, as a person, I'm a huge fan of him.
01:46But also what he brought to that character in the show is indelible, has a lasting impression. So I'm looking forward to meeting him for sure.
01:54And I know this show has a lot of insane special effects. It's technically very demanding. I'm not going to spoil anything, but there was one particular scene with you where I was very shocked by the technicality of it.
02:06Sure, sure, sure. I know what scene you're talking about.
02:08Yes. So I wanted to know kind of in general, maybe that scene or what was the most challenging scene to work through?
02:15I love it. The Brenner scenes, I think, rhythmically are very different than the other scenes in the play, which is kind of like we have a rotational stage that rotates in four different directions.
02:23It's like, you know, very fast cue pickups, jokes, funny jump scares. And then the Brenner scenes are a little bit more legato and like strategic and manipulative and psychological.
02:34So I love that all those scenes build up to these moments of effects or violence or transgression that I think is a beautiful kind of star on the top of the Christmas tree ornament to kind of cap off each Brenner scene with Henry.
02:48Yeah, I know a lot of people looking forward to seeing this in anticipation of season five.
02:54How do you hope that this story wraps up in season five of Street Fighter?
02:58There's some real connective tissue. It's a good question because there are some Easter eggs in this play that will be evident in season five of the TV show.
03:05So if you needed more motivation to come see us, let me drop that on the floor for you to pick up.
03:11That's the only tease that we really need.
03:13Yeah, yeah.
03:14Well, congratulations again on Break Like Tonight.