It’s an act of Jewish healing, to be able to laugh at Hitler,” says Andy Nyman. He would know – he’s spent much of the past 12 months milking the laughter himself. The Leicester-born actor is sitting in an empty rehearsal room for The Producers, an acclaimed revival of Mel Brooks’s daft, incisive Nazi satire that’s transferring from London’s Menier Chocolate Factory to the airier space of the Garrick in September. For his role as Max Bialystock, conniving Broadway producer and seducer of the elderly, Nyman, at 59, is drawing some of the best reviews of his career – a career that’s spanned a slew of shrewdly inhabited parts in Hollywood films (last year’s Wicked; 2019’s Garland biopic Judy), TV series (Peaky Blinders; Unforgotten) and on stage.
It has been 58 years since The Producers first scandalised audiences as an original comedy film, and 24 since it debuted as a stage musical. The story of two Broadway hucksters who contrive the worst piece of theatre imaginable – a gay musical romp through Nazi Germany, titled Springtime for Hitler – The Producers was, and is, a brazen flouting of taboos, an “act of brave, insane writing” on the part of Jewish comedy legend Brooks, says Nyman. “When you think about the demographic of people who would have seen it originally, there would have been lots of people who were either survivors of the camps, or families who had gone through World War Two,” he says. “To have given Jews fundamentally a way of laughing at what happened… is amazing.”
Nyman wears incredibly large, thick-rimmed glasses that seem to engulf a third of his head – the same design worn by the late horror icon George Romero – and speaks with a sort of taut patience. He is precise with his words, and, even when laughing, seems thoroughly serious. It is, he says, a fraught time to be staging a work such as The Producers – perhaps more incendiary now than ever.
“Now, my God, the world has changed,” he says. “You’ve got the far right, more powerful than they’ve probably been for 30 years, all over the world. You’ve got the rise of the LGBTQ+ movement, gender identity, the world is transformed in so many ways. It feels, at times, for a lot of people, like, ‘Oh, God, I’m not sure what you can laugh at. Am I gonna get cancelled?’ The Producers doesn’t seem to care about any of that. The taboo of it is, I think, more essential, more shocking – and funnier – than it’s felt for years.”
I wonder aloud if it’s strange for Nyman, who is Jewish, to be surrounded by swastikas on a daily basis – the Nazi costumes and Hitlerite stage decorations that festoon The Producers’ second act. Yes, he says – and no. “Look, it’s a precarious time to be Jewish at the moment. Our identity in the world is a rocky ground, so you’re constantly – well, not everyone, I can only speak for myself – but your Jewish identity is something that, if you stop and think about it, you stop and think about it a lot. It’s… wobbly.”
The original Bialystock was played by Zero Mostel, a wonderful actor who had a rare combination of physical heft and graceful, precise movement. Nyman, shorter and – even with the fatsuit he wears on stage – svelter than Mostel, gives the character a different energy, a ramshackle piteousness that transforms the unscrupulous theatre has-been into something subtly different. “There are two iconic performances – you’ve got Zero Mostel, and then you’ve got Nathan Lane, who originated the role on stage. Psychologically, you have to give yourself permission to go, ‘It’s not a competition – they’re going to be better. That’s it. They’ve won.’ And that’s the only way I can deal with that.”
Nyman says he avoids reading reviews, wary of the Mostel or Lane comparisons slipping through. If he were to read those from The Producers’ run at the Menier, he’d find almost all are effusive, and his predecessors are seldom mentioned. The production comes amid a bit of a recent boom for Nyman – his turn as Tevye in the 2019 production of Fiddler on the Roof earned him his first Olivier Award nomination. The hit stage-to-screen musical Wicked (2024) cast him as the pernicious stepfather of Cynthia Erivo’s green-skinned witch Elphaba. “It was exactly the way I like to work,” he recalls. “All [Wicked director] Jon M Chu cares about is the truth… That sounds a bit wanky now, doesn’t it?”
Glance at his IMDb profile, and you might peg Nyman as a little-cog/big-machine sort of actor – Wicked sits in his oeuvre alongside huge-budget productions such as Disney’s Jungle Cruise, in which he had a small role, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in which he had a tiny one. But his body of film work also encompasses plum parts in independent productions, most notably Ghost Stories, a self-directed 2017 British indie horror adapted from the 2010 stage show Nyman co-wrote with childhood friend Jeremy Dyson.
Then there’s his long-running collaboration with illusionist Derren Brown, across live shows and TV productions. Varyingly writing, producing or directing many of Brown’s projects, Nyman was involved in the somewhat scandalous 2003 special Russian Roulette Live, in which Brown pointed a supposedly loaded gun at his own head and pulled the trigger. “Derren and I love working together,” he says. “My residing memory is the joy of it. I have great memories of the night Russian Roulette went down, those kinds of landmark pieces of television… but the greatest moments, really, are sitting in the theatre – just waiting to hear the audience react.”
He begins musing on the bigger picture of his own career, and the precarious industry that houses it. After The Producers, Nyman’s next play – another collaboration with Dyson, titled The Psychic – is set to open in York next spring. “But after that, in May, I’m out of work,” he says. “I have no prospects, no idea what’s coming up. Nothing. And that’s what this business is. It’s not like you sit back and think, ‘Oh, I’m at the giddy heights, so I can just relax.’ I’ve always got that sneaking feeling of, ‘Is this the last thing I’ll do? Is it downhill from here?’”
Nyman smiles bittersweetly. If there was a hint of cautious stiffness to his answers at the start of the interview, it has, by this point, completely dissipated. “Again, I don’t mean this in a schmaltzy way,” he adds, “but I am just a kid from Leicester – I’m still that same person. And I know all of the risks and all of the pain and all of the thousands of failures that you go through to have the good fortune to play a fantastic lead in a fantastic show and have someone interview you. I mean, the journey to this point is so massive. It’s never anything I take for granted, because 10 months from now, I could be thinking, ‘F***ing hell, when am I ever gonna be interviewed again? Am I ever gonna play a lead again?’
“But,” he adds, “the biggest thing is to be happy, to hope that my kids are happy, to do anything I can to keep them happy.”
Are you happy, I ask? He seems almost caught off guard by the question.
“I mean, look,” he says, slowly. “You meet me at a tricky place in my life, is the truth. But I am as happy as I can be at the moment. I am predisposed to being ‘cup half full’, thank God. So, yeah – I am.”
‘The Producers’ is at the Garrick Theatre from 1 September 2025 to 21 February 2026
