Interview: Nick Cordileone of THE LION KING at Orpheum Theater

Orpheum Theatre presents The Lion King! Experience the stunning artistry, unforgettable music and exhilarating choreography of this musical theater phenomenon right here!

The multi-award-winning Best Musical about Simba the lion cub and his remarkable journey of transformation from outcast Prince to King of all the animals!

This musical production is better by far than the 1994 animated film, improving on the artistry, the storytelling and depth of the characters. You will be moved by the music, Nants ingonyama bagithi baba! Here comes a lion, Father! What are you waiting for? This is a show not to be missed and something that will stay with you forever! Buy your tickets now for the remarkable Lion King at the Orpheum Theatre in Omaha!

Thank you for taking the time to speak with BroadwayWorld in Omaha!

Thank you.

I’d love to hear a little bit about how you found your way into the arts and your love for performing.

So that is a great place to start! I’ve loved performing kind of since I can remember. I think everybody loves to play pretend. I loved that, but I also loved the idea of showing that pretend to other people - namely, my parents. I would often show them any sort of fantasy I would come up with. And then I got involved in theatre really early through school and church. I was involved in plays from a very early age, like around six or seven I suppose. And then I continued that passion through junior high and high school. I would say in my adolescence, I learned that the people you see on TV and film are doing that for a living. I haven’t really looked back since. I’ve been very fortunate to kind of do that for most of my life. It’s a huge gift and I absolutely love it. Right out of undergrad I started getting professional work, and while I had to have some side jobs, it’s just been straight performing for the most part. It’s been pretty great.

Looking at your résumé, I see a lot of Shakespeare. What do you think you picked up in your studies and experience with those productions that you were able to bring to your role in The Lion King?

It’s funny because on paper it kind of looks sort of out of place, but if you look at it just a little bit longer, you realize they're all timeless stories. These characters are sort of placeholders for the audience for mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Whether they're rulers or whatever, the masks often come off very quickly and it just becomes these pretty human stories. The Lion King is a sort of animal version of Hamlet with characters that borrow from Richard III and Henry V. You start to see them really kind of in sharp detail as you perform it. It’s kind of surprising and fun how hand-in-hand they go.

While you have a lot of stage experience, you also have film and television credits as well. Can you talk a little bit about the contrast in approaching and creating art on camera versus on stage?

It’s all so fun. I was just able to do a show called Warrior with another international cast, and we happened to be shooting in South Africa, so it was sort of this fun melding of worlds. They were all so excited that I was in The Lion King, and it was so exciting to tell all of our Lion King cast that I was getting to go to South Africa, which is where so many of our folks are from. Acting on screen is very intimate and if you sort of think about the idea of the camera picking those moments up versus having to demonstrate all of your extremities, it’s a fun thing to sort of dial back and go, "I can trust that the audience will meet me wherever the lens finds me. I can trust the rest of the team to highlight stuff that I'm doing." You’ve got a director of photography who’s going in and finding a look that would get lost in a Fox Theater that seats 4500 people. You can sort of lay back and trust. But I was sort of surprised by how troop-like film and television can feel depending on the set, where you go and this group of people who all support each other in the same way and they don’t just go back to the trailer after doing their scene and then bounce. It was very fortunate that I experienced something so familiar, and that sort of craftsman motif of folks who were all sort of excited to get that art out there to be consumed.

I would love to hear about your audition experience with The Lion King. Did you need to have any training to use the puppet to portray Timon?

Mine was a very sort of backdoor version of auditions. I was between jobs in New York, and I was fortunate to be a reader for folks who were coming to audition for various productions. The casting agents that I was working with asked if I would help them out with these casting auditions for The Lion King. The normal reader wasn’t there and they needed someone to read with everyone. My first experience was getting to come in and play Young Simba and Sarabi and Mufasa and Bonzai against all these other characters and performers who were coming into audition. The casting directors sort of early on asked if it was something I might be interested in and thought they might be interested in me with what I was doing. It was sort of over several months just getting to read all different types of parts. The last few days is when Julie Taymor came in and I started to focus on Timon. There was really no pressure. In fact, most of the time my energy was spent trying to get other people jobs. It was kind of at the last moment I realized it was something I would really like to do. As for training with the puppets... What is great about Disney is that they look at your relationship to the puppet versus your expertise. They look and ask if you are someone who looks excited to learn as opposed to somebody who has it all down and won’t be taught anything. I

As an artist, how do you approach bringing to life this character that so many people are familiar with whether from stage or screen?

It is so in the cultural memory. It’s a funny experience where I just try to focus on staying honest to what’s on the page. What tends to happen is folks will say things like I sound just like the movie, when truthfully, I don’t sound just like the movie. But it’s a really nice thing to hear. They aren’t worried about impressions. They’re worried about who is the character on the page. Who is this want-to-be-wise-guy Timon?  People see something they recognize and then go, "Oh yeah that’s Timon! It’s just like I remember it." It’s just a nice sort of love letter to the impression and your perception. All I have to do is stay in the playground that the filmmakers created. It’s a gift that they wrote such recognizable characters.

Is there a moment you love in the show, whether it’s a moment you are on stage or watching from the wings?

Absolutely. Hands-down my favorite part is right before we come on for the second act. I get to watch all of the lionesses as they sort of bless Nala and she goes out to do it on her own. She’s not gonna wait for Simba to fix things. She has this really lovely sort of benediction from Rafiki and the lionesses and I don’t know that I can recall many moments where you have the stage full of these powerful women just saying, "Here. Go. You are annointed to sort of go save the kingdom." It’s really beautiful. It’s well lit, and beautifully acted and sung. I get to sit there 10 feet away from it every night and it’s a real gift.

What is it about The Lion King that you think keeps audiences coming back generation after generation?

The story is timeless. I want to say that Disney Theatricals and Julie and the entire creative team honored that by going with old storytelling devices. They really sort of grounded it and what it’s inspired by, which is this South African story and storytelling and language. There’s something that sort of keeps it timeless and has these things that we all recognize. We all see mortality and guilt and finding yourself. We sort of get out of the way of that and let the story do the heavy lifting. It’s equipped for it. The masks and the silks and the singing and the dancing are all sort of working together and mixing together to get on the same page as this classic tale. I think that’s where it’s most successful and how people can really see whatever they are going through in the stuff happening on stage. It’s really pretty remarkable in that way.

Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy

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