Happy 40th birthday to Jonathan Groff!

By Greg Hernandez on Mar 26, 2025 9:05 am | Comments (0) |

I was a bit surprised to see that Jonathan Groff is turning 40 today just as his latest feature film, A Nice Indian Boy, is about to be released.

It just boggles my mind that someone that age has already accomplished so much on stage and screen.

He is currently on Broadway in the musical Just In Time and won the Tony Award last year for Merrily We Roll Along. He later received Tony nominations for playing Melchior Gabor in the original production of the rock musical Spring Awakening (2006) and King George III in the original production of the historical musical Hamilton (2015). He starred as Seymour Krelborn in the Off-Broadway musical revival of Little Shop of Horrors in 2019. He made his West End debut in 2010 in the London revival of Deathtrap, at the Noël Coward Theatre.

On television, Jonathan starred for two seasons in the late, great HBO drama Looking which was the network’s first series centering on the lives of gay men, as well as its subsequent television film, Looking: The Movie (2016). Early in his career he had a recurring guest star as Jesse St. James in the Fox musical-comedy series Glee, 2012, appeared as Ian Todd, a ruthless political aide, in the second and final season of the Starz political drama series Boss, and from 2017-19 portrayed FBI Special Agent Holden Ford in the Netflix period crime drama Mindhunter.

In feature films, Jonathan made his big screen debut playing Michael Lang in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock in 2009. He has since played Louis J. Weichmann in The Conspirator, Smith in The Matrix Resurrections (2021), and a father held hostage in Knock at the Cabin. He also voiced both Kristoff and Sven in the Disney animated Frozen franchise, including Frozen (2013) and Frozen II (2019). My favorite film role of Groff’s is in 2013’s C.O.G., a comedy-drama film adaptation based on David Sedaris’s book of essays, Naked. In the film, Groff plays David, loosely based on Sedaris himself, a young repressed gay man who moves to Oregon in search of a new purpose. The movie opened the Outfest Film Festival in LA in 2013 and it is there that I first interviewed Jonathan and snapped the photo used in this post.