Josh Radnor and Noah Galvin on playing brothers in a new comedy

Though they may prefer not to think of themselves this way, both Radnor and Galvin certainly are money-making talents. Some of the audience for their latest project will be doubtless include fans of the hit American sitcom How I Met Your Mother in which Radnor played the lovelorn, endearingly hapless Ted Mosby. Despite writing and directing two well-received movies since the sitcom finished its nine-year run in 2014, Radnor is still palpably glad to have moved on from “the very big television show” in which he starred for, as he puts it, “a long time”.

“I don’t know if ‘escape’ is the right word, because I’m in a more peaceful place with that show than I’ve ever been,” he says.

After the final sitcom episode was made, Radnor immediately starred on Broadway as Jewish art dealer Isaac in Ayad Akhtar’s explosive post-9/11 play Disgraced. His 2002 debut on the Great White Way was pre-sitcom in the stage adaptation of The Graduate in which Radnor performed the Dustin Hoffman role opposite Kathleen Turner and Alicia Silverstone.

Other Jewish roles include Lonny Flash, one of the team of Nazi-chasers in the Amazon series Hunters starring Al Pacino, and Adam Epstein in the very Jewish divorce dramedy Fleishman Is In Trouble starring Jesse Eisenberg.

Radnor and Galvin (Credit:Bautista Araya)[Missing Credit]

If being back on stage after so long on TV felt like a “palate cleanser”, making his London stage debut must be to experience a new dish.

In Hit Machine the actors play brothers even though, at 51, Radnor looks just about old enough to be the father of the almost obscenely boyish 32-year-old Galvin. Radnor plays a successful music producer and Galvin plays his talented but struggling musician younger sibling.

“In a general sense it’s about how two siblings can grow up in the same household, but if you ask them to tell the stories of their childhoods they’d be two vastly different tales,” says Galvin.

Though both New York Jews, Galvin and Radnor’s childhoods could not have been much more different. Radnor was raised in Columbus, Ohio in an Orthodox family where being Jewish always “felt like being in a minority.

“My father was president of the synagogue for years. My parents sent me to a Hebrew day school from kindergarten to eighth grade. My childhood was pretty steeped in Judaism, but in a kind of Midwestern way.”

It was all very different for Radnor’s wife, psychologist Dr Jordana Jacobs, whom he married in January 2024. “She was raised in Manhattan where her younger brother didn’t even know they were Jewish because everyone was Jewish. He had no sense of otherness. He didn’t even know it was a thing.”

Back to Galvin, whose upbringing was in Westchester, 45 minutes north of Manhattan.

“My father was Catholic and my mother was… Jewish.” Why the hesitation?

“We never sort of labelled our Judaism,” he explains. “It was more a free-wheeling hippy Judaism.”

“Did someone play the guitar?” asks Radnor.

“Oh honey, we had our very own Debbie Friedman,” quips Galvin. “My mom grew up in a generation of ex-hippies that moved from Manhattan and wanted to raise their kids in a place that was green. So she created this community of people, some Jewish and some not, and put together something we called Ahavah. Every Friday night eight families basically came together with moms who took it upon themselves to teach us children about Judaism.”

It was an upbringing, says Galvin, that was “baked in creativity, crafts, gardening and music, and also making plays.” Did the experience lead him to the performing arts?

“In a majorly way,” he says. “My house was really creative. Not a single one of us is a lawyer or a doctor.”

His personal and professional life dovetailed when he married Ben Platt, the performer he took over from in the role of Dear Evan Hansen. Now the couple are each in their own London show at the same time with Platt appearing at the Menier Chocolate Factory in the Mark Sonnenblick musical Midnight at the Never Get.

Radnor’s spouse is also in London. “It’s the first time we’ve travelled together,” he says. “We” being his wife, and their eight-month-month old son. The two married in an eccentric Jewish wedding held in New York state, in a blizzard, under a snow-laden chupah surrounded by loving if freezing friends.

It sounds like the kind of moving and romantic scene in which Radnor might perform on screen. But when it comes to theatre what he likes most is “to be at the centre of a cultural conversation”, which is exactly where he found himself while appearing in a play called The Ally, in 2024.

Written by Itamar Moses, who wrote the book for the musical The Band’s Visit, the play relays the predicament that befalls a liberal Jewish academic who is asked by Baron Price, one of his former students, who is African American, to sign a “manifesto.” The document is a response to the killing of Price’s cousin by the police. Radnor’s character Asaf is definitely up for being an ally to the cause but hesitates when he sees that the manifesto links violence against African Americans with other causes including Palestinians who the document describes as victims of an “ongoing genocide”. His hesitation exposes Asaf to accusations of being complicit in genocide.

“The play takes place before October 7, but it was performed after October 7,” says Radnor.

“My character considers himself a very progressive man of the left, and he’s trying to be an ally. But his parents are Israeli [as are the parents of Itamar Moses] and he feels he just cannot occupy this space anymore,” adds Radnor who speaks about the play in the present tense as if it is still very much alive in his head.

There was, says Radnor, talk of the play going to London but this didn’t materialise. “I’ve always wondered what that was about. I would have gone anywhere with that play.”

At New York’s Public Theatre there was a plain clothes security officer every night watching the play. “I hope he enjoyed it,” Radnor chuckles.

“I had Jewish and Palestinian audience members come up to me, and they all seemed to be very grateful to have me play a person so anguished. To me, that felt like the most honest position to take, one of anguish, and one of heartbreak.”

Perhaps it didn’t find a London stage because having been written and set before October 7 it was seen as dated. Or perhaps there is just no theatre willing to host a work that interrogates the word genocide in that context.

“It’s the lack of nuance that entrenches us in binary [positions]”, offers Galvin who describes himself as having been vocally supportive of Palestinians who says that the Hamas massacre “opened the door for very difficult conversations” in his family.

You get the sense that some of the most robust ones were with his parents-in-law, who are the philanthropist Julie Beren and Marc Platt, the film and theatre producer behind such major titles as Legally Blonde, La La Land and Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. “At the time of October 7, my mother-in-law was the President of the Jewish Federations of North America,” says Galvin.

Radnor chips in with some wisdom. “I think both the left and the right have their own kind of coded purity tests. Like if you’re with us, you believe this and you do not stray. But I just don’t think that’s how people are constructed,” he says.

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Hit Machine is at the Soho Theatre until August 15