Serving success

THE HARDWORKING STAR REFLECTS ON PATIENCE, PASSION AND PUTTING FAMILY FIRST

- By Jennie Noonan

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater's love letter to lyricist Lorenz Hart, Bobby Cannavale plays a quippy bartender in an imagined scenario that sees a heartbroken Hart (played by Ethan Hawke) attend the opening party of Oklahoma! in 1943.

It's the first musical from his former longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers and his new partner, Oscar Hammerstein.

"He's coming into the bar at Sardi's on opening night, and he's trying not to have a drink," Cannavale told Vanity Fair in November 2024.

"It's a great role, because he's there at the bar vomiting his anxieties about the evening ... and I'm sort of like his shrink. It was an incredible experience."

Before becoming a fixture of stage and screen, Cannavale, 55, was just another aspiring actor trying to make ends meet, working in hospitality all over New York City. "I was a very good bartender. I was a pretty sociable guy," he told the New York Post in October, adding that things got more tricky after he became a young dad when his first wife, actress and screenwriter Jenny Lumet, gave birth to their son, Jake, in May 1995. "I became a little less sociable because I was so tired. And also, that's when the clock started ticking for me that I needed to make something happen in this acting game."

Around the time Jake turned 4, Cannavale — who supplemented his bar work with gigs as an audition reader — was cast as an understudy in the Georges Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear.

"After opening night, one of the actors got a role in the Spice Girls movie and I went on," Cannavale recalled in an interview with the Toronto Sun. "This TV producer John Wells saw me in it and I got a television show ... that started everything for me. God bless the Spice Girls."