Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are set to star together on Broadway in a new production of Shakespeare’s Othello, it was announced Wednesday.
The production, directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon, will open in spring 2025 at a yet-to-be-announced Shubert Theatre. Washington will portray the title character, while Gyllenhaal will play the villainous Iago, who malignly sets out to convince Othello that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him. Her portrayer is yet to be cast.
The show’s producer Brian Anthony Moreland told The Daily Beast: “I am immensely excited, I am thrilled that these two people are coming together to do this play. It wasn’t difficult to get them together to do it, they’re both artists and they both wanted to it. It made me very happy. They are an absolute dream. I’m really over the moon.” Laughing, he added, “It’s been very difficult to keep under wraps. We’ve been talking about it for a while, it’s been the worst-kept secret ever!”
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Of doing the show on a contemporary Broadway stage, Moreland said, “I hope it brings understanding and brings people to coalesce around an idea of what we can be in the world, and to further general understanding. I am very excited about it, because of the story, and because of who these two actors are, where we are as a society, and that this will be on Broadway—all of it.”
Washington, a two-time Oscar winner, won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2010 for his role in Fences and was nominated again in 2018 for his role in The Iceman Cometh. Gyllenhaal was nominated for Best Actor in a Play Tony in 2021 for his role is Sea Wall/A Life, and the same year in the Best Play category for his role as a producer of Slave Play.
