How Halston Star Krysta Rodriguez Became Liza Minnelli
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Although the filming of Halston, the Netflix limited series about fashion’s glamorous, troubled 1970s golden boy, wrapped last December, Krysta Rodriguez—who stars as the designer’s friend and confidante Liza Minnelli—hasn’t yet left the world that the legendary pair created.
“I’ve been renovating my own house to add a little Halston-Liza flair,” Rodriguez, who also works as an interior designer, says. “I want it to feel like a sophisticated place where people will climb on the roof. What Halston had was a place where, when the lights went out, it all went down.”
When the five-part series—which stars Ewan McGregor as the designer—premieres May 14, we’ll all be plus-ones on a tear through the fashion, nightlife, and high society of the disco era. But beyond the cocaine and caviar (and there’s plenty) the series portrays a singular friendship between two misunderstood people who were able to bring out the best in each other.
“Liza has been replicated so often by people trying to do impersonations and emulate her,” says Rodriguez, 36, a California native whose career on stage and screen has included roles in Spring Awakening, A Chorus Line, Gossip Girl, and Smash. “What I wanted to get into was her emotional journey and her relationship to Halston. They were linked their whole lives, and I think that the two of them meeting created both of them.”
The series’ director, Daniel Minahan agrees. “The thing about Halston and Liza,” he says, “is that they gave each other their best selves.” And to embody that dynamic, he needed an actress who could play Minnelli at her best. “Besides the similarities of Krysta’s physicality—she has the right bone structure and those big, beautiful eyes—she found the guilelessness, sadness, and tenacity that Liza has.”
Rodriguez says, “The show is about Halston, it’s his story. The rest of the characters exist in relation to him. The function of Liza in this series is to be that person who is with him through more things than anyone else; she’s there when he calls in the middle of the night, she’s the one who talks him down when he’s threatening to walk off at [an infamous fashion show at] Versailles. They never tiptoe around each other, and that’s what lets them continue to grow as friends.”
She also learned how to make an entrance worthy of the character. For her first scene, Rodriguez filmed Minnelli performing “Liza with a Z” in a nightclub for an audience including Halston and fashion illustrator Joe Eula. In her earliest moments on screen, Rodriguez is dynamite; she simultaneously delivers a knockout performance of Minnelli’s signature Kander and Ebb number and establishes her Liza as smart, funny, gutsy, and preternaturally talented. Audiences should expect to be floored, and Rodriguez’s costars say that they were as well.
“The first thing we shot with Krysta was her doing ‘Liza with a Z,’ and I was sitting there with David Pittu [who plays Eula] and the lights went down and on Krysta came and she just blew us away,” McGregor says. “It was just amazing; she can really do that. Then we had a little, post-concert scene where we're drunk and I'm telling her about her look, and from that moment on, we just clicked. We see Halston in his fashion world and with the people he works with, and you see him with his lovers, but his relationship with Liza, is in a way the backbone of the piece.”
The role of trusted confidant is one Rodriguez was seemingly born to play. “Krysta has a remarkable ability to cut the bullshit,” says Kathryn Gallagher, the actress who met Rodriguez when they both appeared in Deaf West Theatre’s production of Spring Awakening. “She came into the show and became the rock that grounded our company. She’s become the person I go to whenever I need advice, and she’s who you want to talk to when things are complicated or if you have a moment of insecurity. Krysta knows so certainly who she is and matches that with unparalleled talent and experience.”
Rodriguez’s interest in the arts began early. Her parents still have pictures of her as an infant banging on piano keys, and a formative moment came when she was five and saw her first musical, Annie. “I remember getting the ticket, and being like, ‘I don't even know what this is,’ and my mom explained to me what a musical was, and what we were going to go see,” she says. “We were second row center, and I remember looking at the little girl and her dog and the shell-shaped footlights saying, ‘I think this is heaven. I think I've arrived at the best feeling you could possibly have.’”
Despite showing up to a first-grade career day dressed as what she called “a singer,” Rodriguez didn’t get serious about performing until she was 12, when she became involved with a local children’s theater. “I got back in the car with my mom, and I was like, ‘Mom, I just love the smell of the theater. It smells differently in there,’” she says. “Now I know it's mold and lead-based paint, but it's true. You walk into a theater of any kind, and it smells different. She said, ‘People do theater for a living,’ and I remember being like, ‘Wait, what? Why has no one said this to me until this point?’”
Four years later, she had moved across country to study musical theater at NYU and was immersed in the cultural scene of New York City, second-acting shows like Bernadette Peters’s Gypsy (“I’m a major rule follower, so that was incredibly nerve wracking!”), attending open calls, and spending weekends at drag shows and student-production fundraisers. Her Actors’ Equity card came care of a City Center production of Bye Bye Birdie, and when a production of the Beach Boys musical Good Vibrations moved to Broadway, she dropped out of college to take a part as a swing performer. “It happened right at the semester break, when I couldn't get my money back,” she says. “My counselors were like, ‘You're going to lose your tuition money if you do the show.’ And I was like, ‘No, I'm going to be on Broadway.’”
After Vibrations, Rodriguez went back to school only to leave once more for a tour of The Boy Friend, directed by Julie Andrews. But it was an experience as an audience member, and not on stage, that really helped her focus on what should come next. “One day after school, I saw the Off-Broadway production of Spring Awakening, and that's when my life truly began,” she says. “I left the theater staggering, and I called my mom and told her, ‘This show is the best thing I've ever seen. It's meant for young people, and I know they're moving to Broadway. If they'll let me sweep the floors of the theater, I'll be a part of it. I don't care.’ I just made it my goal, and I was just a dog on a bone until I got cast in that show. That was my introduction really to Broadway, and theater, and the career. There was a bit of like, 'I'm going to make it,' and then setbacks, and then a slow build once it happened.”
Early in her career, Rodriquez had initially avoided television gigs in favor of theater, but eventually, she says, “My bones were creaking, and I was 23 years old. I thought, OK. I'll throw my hat in the ring for TV.” Her first television role was on Gossip Girl, and after a sojourn to Los Angeles to film a pilot that didn’t get picked up, Rodriguez returned to New York and landed a part on the Broadway TV drama Smash. (Diplomatically discussing the series’ infamously mixed reception, she says, “I believe our show coined the phrase ‘hate-watching.’”)
Smash was canceled in 2013, and it was the next year—during rehearsals for Spring Awakening on Broadway—that Rodriguez was diagnosed with breast cancer. As she wrote in Time magazine in 2016, “The truth is, there is no ‘early’ that feels early enough. Any stage of cancer can, and likely will, alter your life completely. Maybe not permanently in all ways, but in many. I am learning my ‘new normal’ every day. And becoming cancer-free was not an easy journey. But discovering what was actually happening in my body was my first step to freedom, not the worst day of my life.” She also founded a website, ChemoCouture, to document her experience in recovery.
Through her illness, Rodriguez stuck with her part in the revival of Spring Awakening—the show went on to earn glowing reviews and a Tony nomination—and continued working steadily. She appeared in the NBC crime spoof Trial & Error and the thriller Quantico and starred in Netflix’s post-apocalyptic action series Daybreak. Then came Liza.
“Right off the bat,” Minahan explains, “we had a lot of submissions from a lot of established people, and my casting director did a deep dive into all the Broadway babies in New York. Once I saw Krysta’s tape, I wanted to meet her immediately.” The director was glad that he did.
“Working with her in the casting office was a revelation,” he says. “We asked her to prepare her favorite Liza song; we met twice and the first time she did ‘You’ve Let Yourself Go,’ which is a sweet ballad, the second time she did ‘Maybe This Time’ and she just blew us out of the room. She was absolutely incredible.”
For Rodriguez, the playing Minnelli was the chance of a lifetime. “I was, of course, a fan—no one in musical theater is not a fan—but I don't think I was prepared for the depth of fanaticism that I was going to feel once I lived with her,” she says. “I find her to be the most inspiring person I've ever gotten to know, and I don't even know her. When I got the audition, I opened up the email, and my heart just started pounding. I don't know why I had that feeling. I just thought, this needs to be mine.”
Rodriguez makes the most of her part. Her Liza gets to perform show-stopping numbers, party at Studio 54, dash to rehab, and wear some of Halston’s most glamorous creations throughout it all, but the actress also explores sides of the icon that aren’t always visible. “I hope people embrace this version of her,” she says. “I believe Liza to be quite grounded, which isn’t what her persona has become. Her goal in life was to be an Oscar-winning actress, she didn’t want to be the variety-show version of who she was. I wanted to honor that as much as I could.”
It was that nailing of the inner life of an icon that Rodriguez says was the most important thing she had to do. “What I tried to honor was her genuine humanity,” she says. “There is a quote of hers I read: When someone asked, ‘Would you ever do any of your mother’s songs?’ she said, ‘My mother sang about victims, and I sing about survivors.’”
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
You Might Also Like
