Stage & Screen

From Broadway’s bright lights to D.C.’s big drama, BrainDead’s Aaron Tveit knows how to take center stage.

- Hudson Morgan

HOW’S THIS FOR A CHARACTER ARC? Aaron Tveit starts his career in musicals (Wicked, Next to Normal), then does a TV show based on a book (Gossip Girl), then goes back to Broadway for a musical based on a movie (Catch Me If You Can), then goes back to TV (Graceland), then does a movie based on a musical (Les Misérables), and then combines all of those things into one single project: a movie, for TV, based on a musical (Grease: Live). Oh, and then he lands one of his biggest roles yet, as a hotshot political operative on the new summer drama BrainDead from Robert and Michelle King, whom you may know from a little show called The Good Wife. During a break in shooting season one, we caught up with the 32-year-old triple-threat Tveit (pronounced Tuh-VATE) to talk work, play and what’s weirder: his new show about brain-eating aliens in politics … or what’s actually happening in politics right now.

WATCH!: So where are we catching you?

AARON TVEIT: I just got home to my apartment in Astoria, Queens.

WATCH!: You’re shooting most of the show in New York?

TVEIT: Primarily, but we’re going to D.C. a few more times, because you can do a lot of stuff here on a stage, but for a scene with Mary Elizabeth [Winstead] with the Washington Monument in the background, you can’t get that anywhere else!

WATCH!: How’s it all going so far?

TVEIT: It’s going great. It’s one of the chillest, no-BS sets I’ve ever been on. I did an episode of