Ariana DeBose Reveals One of Her Dream Broadway Roles

It’s safe to say Ariana DeBose knows her way around the American theater. While the multi-hyphenated talent has been mostly focusing on movies as of late (after all, she won an Oscar for Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story in 2022), DeBose’s career began and will forever be linked with the stage.

Before film and streaming, DeBose made her acting debut in the original cast of Bring It On: The Musical in 2011, which in turn paved the way for appearing in various Broadway productions throughout the 2010s, including in the original cast of Hamilton and as the title character in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, for which she was nominated for a Tony. Hollywood has come calling since, but DeBose hasn’t forgotten her roots; in fact, she’s hosted the Tony Awards three times in just the past five years.

All of which is to say when we sat down with DeBose to discuss her new film project, Love Hurts, it still seemed prudent to ponder about a future on Broadway—and what might be some of the iconic musical roles DeBose would like to still play.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” DeBose at first teases. “There are many characters that I do love, and some of them won’t make sense… but you could say Velma Kelly is a touchstone. I actually love the Broadway production of Chicago because it’s simple, it’s not doing too much, it stands on its own, and that’s why it’s run for so many years. It will never go out of style.”

Indeed, the current iteration of the Kander and Ebb musical about independent women in Jazz Age Chi-Town—and the men they kill along the way—has been playing in New York’s Theater District since 1996 and is currently the longest-running musical still playing on the Great White Way. It is also a revival of the original Bob Fosse production from 1975, which perhaps serendipitously starred Chita Rivera in the role of Velma Kelly. Rivera also originated on stage the character of Anita in West Side Story. That’s the role DeBose won an Oscar for reinterpreting in this century.

“I will play Velma Kelly one day,” DeBose continues. “I don’t know when that day will be. But I got some things up my sleeve, which is why I’m not telling you my ultimate goal, because I want you to be surprised when I do it.”

In the meantime, DeBose is getting to let her action badass flag fly in Love Hurts, a comedy genre film where her Rose is a semi-femme fatale agent of chaos in the life of mild-mannered Gable (Ke Huy Quan), a pleasant seeming realtor who is revealed to be a retired assassin that once was ordered to put DeBose’s Rose in the ground. Instead he let her go, not expecting her to ever show up again in his life. It’s complicated—as are fight sequences that let DeBose indulge in a different kind of choreography than of the Broadway variety.

“I look at fight sequences, action sequences, and it’s just another form of dance,” DeBose explains. “It’s the same palette, different colors, right? So it’s not like I’m going to fight from a blue space. I’m fighting from blood-burgundy and burnt orange, and it was just really fun, and it was really freeing and I could trust my body, trusted the team around me to let me try. If you talk to [director Jonathan Eusebio], he’ll tell you I was always like, ‘Can I do more? Can I kick my legs more?’”

Love Hurts will kick into theaters on Friday, Feb. 7, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

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