How Tom Francis Brings Broadway to a Standstill Every Night

Tom Francis looks hard at his cellphone in the West Village café, and sighs as a puppy cam relays the movements of his one-year-old canine, Ella, a few blocks away at his apartment overlooking the Hudson River.

“I know she has pissed on the floor, which I am going to have to clean up after this,” Francis says as Ella totters in and out of shot. Francis is fostering her for two weeks to see how she fits in with his hectic Broadway schedule as he also causes quite the stir on camera on the streets of New York in Sunset Blvd. (St. James Theatre, booking to July 6, 2025).

Francis’ top-of-act-two excursion down the steps of the theater and out to Shubert Alley, while singing the title song on camera as New York street life bustles around him—all relayed back to the audience via a big screen—is already a Broadway moment of the year.

In the final scene of the show, the 25-year-old British actor stands on stage clad only in his underwear, chest smeared with stage blood. Only a few years out of drama school, he’s a star.

The visually stunning revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and co-starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, has been hailed by critics, with performances coming to applause-reverberating standstills after Scherzinger’s big numbers and Francis’ reappearance in the theater after his street-traversing number. With the help of security guards, he somehow avoids physical injury and—even more improbably as an New Yorker will know—any random pedestrian or vehicular blowups.

Time will tell whether Francis scoops a Tony Award for the role. He won the British equivalent, an Olivier Award, when Sunset wowed the West End. (On that night, he did the number in and around the Royal Albert Hall where the awards were held.)

Whatever, Francis sees New York as his home now, with intentions to build a career—in film, TV, and music—once his all-consuming commitment to Sunset ends next summer. Before his Broadway run, he filmed a role in the fifth and final season of psychological drama You. Deadline reported Francis’ character, Clayton, is “a pretentious, self-absorbed, wannabe author whose vindictive, controlling nature” draws protagonist Joe’s (Penn Badgley) attention.

“I love New York for the fact you can finish a show, go for a meal, everywhere is open,” Francis says, ordering a peppermint tea in the West Village café where we sit. “The fact that’s anything’s possible; it really does feel you can dream and figure out what you want to do and you will make it happen. People talk about the theater community here as being like a real community, and it is. It’s so nice to be part of it. Everyone links and connects in a really beautiful way.”

Heading out onto the street every night is like a “fever dream” Francis says of his standout Sunset number. He is wearing specially designed and molded headphones, with expanding foam, which screen out all the street and surrounding noise, meaning Francis can only hear his own voice and the orchestra.

Occasionally, scrambled frequencies mean he loses contact with the music for a few seconds, but on he sings. He laughs. “It’s like what Miles Teller (‘Rooster’) tells Tom Cruise (Maverick) in Top Gun: Maverick: ‘Don’t think, just do.’”

The experience is like being “in focus” while everything around him is a blur, he says. “I’m very aware of everything happening, but not at the same time. It’s very hard to describe, but it’s the weirdest sensation I’ve ever had. Have you ever had an out-of-body experience? I sometimes get that when I look in the mirror, and float above and look down on myself. It’s kind of like that every night.”

Nothing too crazy has happened thus far, he says; if people get in his way, or get caught up in his slipstream it is momentary—although one show when he did it, and ended up walking into a “crowd of a thousand people” emerging from a performance of neighboring musical Hell’s Kitchen was “pretty intense.”

He is only nervous if he knows family or loves ones are at that night’s performance, but “adrenaline helps gets you through.” At the show’s final performance in London, hundreds of pedestrians and fans came out to celebrate his final time doing the walk.

The idea of it never felt strange to Francis because of his rock-solid belief in the artistry and vision of director Jamie Lloyd, who has crafted the show as a sparsely furnished visual fantasia of black and white, stage smoke, and cameras that are both starkly modern and also summon up Billy Wilder’s classic black and white 1950 movie.

“She eats you alive if you don’t turn up”

“I have been really lucky in having a co-star like Nicole,” Francis says of acclimatizing to the sudden stardom Sunset has brought. “She is a guiding light for anything I have gone through or anything I will go through. I wasn’t intimidated by the idea of working with [her], I was excited. And we just play every night, and have fun together. She’s like my sister, we’re like ‘Oh, you’re going there tonight. Well, I’ll go here.’ She always wins obviously. You have to be on your game. She eats you alive if you don’t turn up. She’s truly a force of nature.

“I couldn’t ask for a better co-star. When everything started kicking off, she was incredible. She’s the kindest and sweetest person in the world. Her advice was: ‘Don’t read any comments or media, stay true to yourself and who you are and it will be fine. Get the right group of people around you.’ I didn’t know any of this was going to happen. I didn’t know it was going to such a catapulting job for me and take me to Broadway. I can’t really believe I call it my job.

“When I watch her do ‘With One Look,’—this 11 o’ clock number, 15 minutes into the show, and the effect it has on the audience—I’m like, ‘This is the most special place to be right now. This is the power of live theater.’ The way she sings, the way she controls her voice, the way it makes you feel—it’s ethereal.”

Scherzinger caused controversy after asking, in a now-deleted Instagram post, where she could get a hat Russell Brand was sporting that read “Make Jesus First Again.” Some felt the phraseology implied she supported Donald Trump. Scherzinger later apologized in a lengthy Instagram post, denying her original post denoted any political affiliation.

“She put out her statement and did that and we are all very focused on turning up and doing the show,” Francis says. “The show is the most important thing. We put our hearts and souls into that every night. Everyone appreciated that she is turning up to work, and delivering the incredible performance she does every single night—because that’s what she loves to do.” (Francis was out of the show at the time, suffering from a vocal abrasion.)

Francis has held true to Scherzinger’s advice to not read media coverage. He will do “when the job is done,” but admits he does know the show has received raves. He is “militant” about this self-imposed erasure of media commentary, good or bad. “I said to Jamie, I’m approaching this job like a police horse with my blinkers on. There is so much noise and hype I just want to turn up and do my job and not let it affect me in any way because otherwise it might alter things, and I might not have the performance I want to have.”

He laughs. “I’ve been like, ‘Mum and dad, don’t send the reviews,’ but it’s incredibly gratifying to know the show has been received so well.” (Francis is single, having previously dated co-star Hannah Yun Chamberlain, who plays the younger incarnation of Norma.)

As for stripping down every night, Francis laughs. “Yeah, I don’t mind about it. I’m game for anything. I just trust Jamie implicitly with anything he wants me to do. I never had a problem with it. I try to go to the gym as much as possible. I look how I look. I’m proud of how I look. I don’t have the most beautiful body in the world by the standards of Instagram, but I’m proud to be who I am. Most of my family find it funny that I am in my boxers because I’d run around all the time when I was young in them. Now I get paid for it. And it’s a poignant part of the show. It’s a metaphor of me getting rid of everything Norma has given to me.”

“Imagine what a golden retriever is like...”

When Francis’ mom, Christine, saw the show for the first time, “she couldn’t talk for like 25 minutes,” the actor recalls. “This was her son, and I’m not like Joe Gillis in any way in my day to day life as a character, so I think she found it disconcerting or weird that she saw her son transform himself into a different person in stage.”

All Francis’ family are farmers—on her mother’s side from around Essex in the Southeast of England, and on his dad Adrian’s side from Warrington in the Northwest. His parents were not farmers; his father, formerly a graphic designer, works for an energy company; his mother, a former administrative officer in a school, is now his assistant. His brother and sister, Jack and Rachel, are five years older than him, and twins—he was born on the same day as them.

He laughs that he was “actively feral” as a little boy. “Imagine what a golden retriever is like as a puppy. That was what I was like. I had so much energy. There was a lot of football, hockey, climbing trees, running around woods, making dens, and building treehouses. My mum tells a story about being on the phone to my grandma when I was 7 or 8, looking up and seeing me 20 to 30 feet up in a tree, hanging off a branch in a Superman cape.”

Francis was “supposed to be a farmer” himself, but he was always into music, having sung in choirs and played piano and guitar. He and his dad would go to guitar shops. “He was a massive Queen, Billy Bragg, and The Smiths fan. I was more into AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses. I grew up singing Axl Rose—that’s what I wanted to be.”

The family lived in a village, next to a church—“We were holiday Christians, we’d go at Christmas”—whose vicar said Francis had a good voice and should go to Westminster (a private London school noted for its music). “But all my mates went to the local school, so I pushed back on any ‘threat’ to send me there.”

Francis, who is “very dyslexic,” hated regular schooling—his dyslexia went formally undiagnosed throughout his childhood, meaning reading was “infuriating.” (He was finally formally diagnosed at 18, while at drama school.)

Around 12, he watched a YouTube video of Oasis singing “Champagne Supernova,” playing guitar and singing along, annoyed like any stroppy kid that his parents were watching him. “I felt they were invading my privacy, but afterwards we all sat down and they said, ‘You’ve got a really beautiful voice, and we’ll support you in any way you want.’ They didn’t push me, they just facilitated anything I wanted to do.”

At 17, Francis did a diploma in musical theater, then attended ArtsEd drama school in London (White Lotus star Leo Woodall was in the year above). He graduated during the pandemic. Drama school was “a tough place. You have got to be built a certain way to thrive there, and I don’t think I necessarily thrived there, but it gave me the tools to thrive in the industry.”

Before getting his career-making role in Sunset Boulevard, Francis performed in productions of Hair, Rent (a particularly formative experience, he says, thanks to director Luke Sheppard), and & Juliet, playing Romeo, a role which taught Francis “a lot about turning up, doing the job, owning the role, and having fun doing it. Selfishly, I just wanted to be on stage more. I am Norma Desmond!”

“A real pinch-me moment...”

There were nine auditions over two weeks for Francis’ Sunset role. He had an inkling after three auditions that Lloyd wanted to cast him as Joe. (As a dyslexic person, he has found the most useful way to master learning a script is to break it down into chunks, writing the first letters down of each word.)

“I trust Jamie implicitly with everything. This is his vision, and he has created a great company culture where everyone works at such a high level,” Francis says of director Lloyd. “When you surrender yourself to his vision it’s the most rewarding process ever. He really knows how to steer the ship.

“Before we began performances, there were two months of intense conversations figuring out what it was, and how we could get everything we want from this show. Everyone—me, Nicole, the cast, front of house, the cameras, sound, wardrobe, stage managers, security—has put so much time and work and effort into the show.”

Francis says he is not reflecting on his success, but trying to enjoy it. “I can’t help but think that it’s kind of crazy that this feral child from Suffolk is now living in New York, in a huge show on Broadway. I wouldn’t say I’m famous. Nicole is famous. I’m up and coming in musical theater. People are starting to recognize me, which is nice, and they’re generally very polite and respectful. It’s beginning, but I’m not there yet. In my mind, it’s weird that there aren’t any famous accountants or decorators. The weird thing is that fame is a byproduct of this job.”

Francis is “very excited” to release the solo album he’s been working on—it’s “John Mayer meets Coldplay,” he says. “Not Axl Rose any more!” It’s good to have a creative outlet that isn’t musical theater, he says; alongside TV and film acting, “everything scratches a different itch” for him. “My dream career is like Donald Glover’s. He does it all, and has a great time doing it.”

The Olivier win “was a real pinch-me moment. I hadn’t thought about it, because I was so nervous about doing the number in front of an audience of such prestigious actors and producers who I might want to give me jobs in the future. I didn’t want to look like a complete melon. It was such a tight category of incredible performances. I really was shocked when my name was announced. It’s lovely to receive any award, even if it’s so subjective what one person may judge my performance above any other. It was also beautiful to come together with my peers to celebrate all our work.”

Is Francis ambitious to win a Tony Award to make it a transatlantic double?

“It definitely makes me ambitious to win a Tony. But again, the only way I see myself even getting nominated is by keeping my blinkers on, and doing the show every night. It’s hard, but I try not to think about it. It’s better to stay completely focused on the prize—the prize of turning up every night and doing my job.” He remains level-headed, he says, with his “tough” mom driving him hard and keeping his feet on the ground.

Then there is Ella, and her unfortunate puddle-making. Francis gets up from our table, his eyes trained back on the puppy cam and a certain domestic incident that for now requires more urgent attention than the histrionic demands of Norma Desmond.