Griffin Matthews takes off on ‘Flight Attendant,’ goes off on Broadway racism
Griffin Matthews may have been the only person in Pittsburgh whose friends made fun of him for carving out time every Sunday to watch the Steelers.
The 39-year-old McCandless native, a North Allegheny High School alum and Carnegie Mellon School of Drama graduate, used to be jeered by fellow acting students who weren’t from Western Pennsylvania for dropping everything on Steelers game day.
“That’s what we do in this town. We stop and watch the Steelers,” Mr. Matthews said of his hometown.
“It’s one of the sweetest, friendliest places. I miss it. I can’t wait to get back on the plane and see my parents and my city.”
“The Flight Attendant” star talked recently to the Post-Gazette about his involvement with that show, his formative years here and his ideas for making Broadway more inclusive.
Flying high
Mr. Matthews currently lives in Los Angeles but spent months jetsetting around the world filming “The Flight Attendant,” HBO Max’s buzzy comic thriller that was renewed for a second season in December. He plays Shane Evans, a fellow flight attendant and friend to protagonist Cassie (Kaley Cuoco), who gets caught up in a mess after one bloody night in Bangkok.
From their first table read together, there was an “instant chemistry” between Mr. Matthews and Ms. Cuoco, most famous for playing Penny on 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory.”
“It’s like a date,” he said. “I sat down in the chair across from her and I was like, we’re going to be friends.”
Spoiler alert: Not everything is as it seems with Shane. Now that the character’s real purpose in the show has been revealed, he will “be even more myself in the series” going forward, Mr. Matthews said.
Since earning his degree at CMU in 2003, the Broadway veteran has done a lot of TV, including a memorable performance as D’Unte on Netflix’s “Dear White People” series. But “The Flight Attendant” is his most high-profile role yet. Mr. Matthews watched the finished product along with the rest of us and is glad “the show captured the joy we had making it.”
Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. He split time between New York City, Bangkok and Rome while the series filmed on location, including after COVID-19 began ravaging the world. “The Flight Attendant” crew actually got an early warning about the virus from their new friends in Rome.
“Our Italian crew was texting us, ‘Do you all know what’s
coming?’” Mr. Matthews said. “That’s when I called my parents and was like, ‘You guys, there’s a virus coming.’ That was the craziness of COVID, that we actually got a little head start on it.”
Finding authenticity
As his career begins to soar, Mr. Matthews is happy to reminisce about where his own flight began.
His family moved to McCandless from Pittsburgh when Mr. Matthews was in second grade, and it took him a while to get used to both the relative quiet of the suburbs and its lack of diversity. He expected to go to college for broadcast journalism, and didn’t know musical theater was an option until 11th grade. At 16, Mr. Matthews drove himself to CMU for his School of Drama audition, and both he and his parents were shocked when he was accepted.
He was part of an all-star CMU freshman class that included Leslie Odom Jr., Josh Gad, Katy Mixon and, for a semester, Josh Groban. Mr. Odom was the best man at his wedding and vice versa. Mr. Matthews also crossed paths on campus with older now-celebrities like Matt Bomer, Pablo Schreiber, Joe Manganiello and Cote de Pablo.
“When I showed up as a skinny 17-year-old, I’m looking at Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello. It was so inspiring and scary. I was like, are we going to become them?”
Mr. Matthews echoed fellow CMU graduates Victoria Pedretti (“The Haunting of Bly Manor”) and Myha’la Herrold (“Industry”) in saying his university training was worthwhile but not particularly fun.
“I couldn’t find my place in that program” at first, he said, because the school at the time valued a type of actor he just wasn’t.
“Deep voices, big masculine muscles, Shakespeare,” he said. “I wasn’t any of those things .... When I left Carnegie Mellon, I understood that I had the foundation of acting in me. My task in the world was to get closer to myself.
“That’s when I stopped speaking in a deep voice, stopped worrying about my muscle size and started being myself. I used what I could from my education and the rest was a journey to find my authenticity.”
‘Equitable’ theater?
Part of Mr. Matthews’ journey involved a mission trip to Uganda when he was 23.
“I stumbled into conversations about race and being a white person in the world,” he said. “The Ugandans called me a white person. I thought Africa, I’m coming home. And they’re like, ‘You’re a white person.’ They didn’t think of me as an African American, just American, and American means white to them.”
His experiences led to him starting his nonprofit Uganda Project and, eventually, he and husband Matt Gould collaborated on the off-Broadway musical “Witness, Uganda,” also known as “Invisible Thread.”
In June 2020, Mr. Matthews let loose in an Instagram video about the racism he experienced in trying to bring “Witness, Uganda” to Broadway. The video went viral, and “touched a nerve” with other Black Broadway folks, showing the issues he was discussing are pervasive and worth discussing.
“No one’s going to lose because Broadway became a safer, more equitable space,” he said. “Everyone makes more money, the reach expands, the relevancy is returned. That’s why I put it out.”
The video included shots at the Tony-winning musical “The Book of Mormon.” Mr. Matthews did the final workshop for the production before it hit Broadway. Although the musical is set mostly in Uganda, he felt the Mormons depicted in that show were much more fully formed characters than the Ugandans.
“I want to be careful that we’re not putting out ‘humor’ at the expense of people who don’t have a voice,” he said.
Mr. Matthews hopes the pandemic that has shut down live theater nationwide gives everyone “a chance to look at ourselves and fix the parts of our industry that we don’t like.”
He’s also optimistic that in a post-COVID world, Broadway will return better than ever thanks to “a great boom in innovation around the theater” and audiences’ insatiable desire for in-person shows.
“Theater is church . ... People go there to laugh and cry and feel their feelings. I think after this horrific experience we’ve been through, people will be ready to get back together and have a communal experience.”