Eva Noblezada and Reeve Carney have gone through hell and back to be together. The Broadway power couple first met while surviving the horrors of the underworld in Hadestown before traveling to Weimar Republic Germany in Cabaret. Now, they’re hurtling through time together yet again, dropped into the decadent Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby.
Carney and Noblezada first crossed paths in London in 2017, at a chemistry read to play the star-crossed lovers in Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s reimagining of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. They reprised their roles when the show transferred to Broadway the following year, receiving critical acclaim and 14 Tony nominations for its jazz and folk-infused score and moodily atmospheric staging. (A proshot of the musical, featuring other original cast members, was recorded in London last year, and will be released in theaters on July 24.)
This success was nothing new to the performers. Noblezada had skyrocketed to fame after starring as Kim in the 2017 revival of Miss Saigon on the West End and Broadway, and Carney wrote and performed songs in a self-titled band before playing the title role in the infamously troubled musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. He then joined the cast of the Gothic horror series Penny Dreadful, playing Dorian Gray.
Nearly nine years after that fateful meeting in London, their chemistry is still apparent. Sitting side by side in Noblezada’s dressing room before a matinee of The Great Gatsby—in which they both currently star—the two seamlessly finish each other’s sentences while affectionately touching legs or arms and laughing at each other’s antics.
“You always hear stories about people actually getting together in real life, how it can mess up their chemistry on stage or on screen,” Carney says, recalling the early, furtive days of their romance as Hadestown costars. (After announcing their engagement during a concert in New York last spring, they married in New Orleans in October.) “The only thing that presented any hesitation at all at that point was, ‘Oh, no, we don’t want to mess up the show. Thankfully, people didn’t feel that way.”
Still, Noblezada takes care to maintain some distance between her personal life and her character work. “I always say that the biggest compliment you can give me is, ‘You completely disappeared in your role,’” she says. “I’ve done this before in other roles, when I was finding my feet as an actress, [thinking], ‘This part of the show, she feels this, and I feel like this in my life. So why don’t I bring myself in this moment?’ It’s like your past self that has experienced this emotional trauma that you’re trying to show on stage is fighting and conflicting with your character. Then it becomes messy, and I feel like it loses a lot of focus and clarity from a performance perspective.”
She and Carney avoid that messiness with boundaries around their personal lives, despite their public displays of affection over social media. “We are quite private,” Carney says.
“Reeve and I are very intentional, and we don’t like to, in some ways, have our foods touch in certain things of our life,” adds Noblezada, reflecting on the contrast between herself and Eurydice. Where she finds safety in their marriage, her character was a guarded young woman focused on survival and skeptical of Orpheus’s romantic pursuit.
“Reeve and I have so much trust together that it was interesting and fun to play against the falling-in-love part. The softening into the vulnerability and intimacy that [Eurydice] has not really experienced made it so much more beautiful and symbiotic, making sure that it’s not Reeve and Eva on stage. It’s strictly how Orpheus and Eurydice would have interacted with each other.”