By SHARON EBERSON
Jimmy Nicholas is an “and” guy, not an “or” guy.
That’s how the actor explains all of the “ands” after acting jobs, including the title role in Pittsburgh CLO’s upcoming premiere musical, The Perfect Mate.
at Pittsburgh CLO’s 2018 Spark Festival. (Image: Matt Polk)
A 2014 Carnegie Mellon graduate and a board member of the university’s New York Drama Alumni Clan, Nicholas is probably best known for 20 episodes as Paramedic Chief Evan Hawkins on NBC’s Chicago Fire.
And/or perhaps you caught him on Broadway, when he was a standby/replacement for Elder Price in The Book of Mormon.
And/or maybe you know him from his podcast, Everything but the Kitchen Sink, with fellow CMU alum and writer Kyle Wilson.
And/or maybe you’ve heard he has competed in the Spartan Games and, this past spring, he qualified for the Hyrox World Championships in Nice, France. (Hyrox is an intense global fitness and endurance challenge.)
There’s more, but first, let’s get to know Jimmy Nicholas, The Perfect Mate, a role he originated for the PCLO commission that was developed at the 2018 Spark Festival.
The musical by David Rossmer and Dan Lipton finds the character of Joan (Autumn Hurlbert) looking for true love in the year 2163. When she wins a competition to test the PerfectMate, an emotionally savvy robot, she thinks she may have found her lifetime match – but it turns out perfection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“What an interesting premise, right?,” Nicholas said during a recent phone interview. “Telling people like, ‘Hey, my role is, ‘I’m playing The Perfect Mate,’ is always a bit of a funny moment.”
How he got here is one of those “crazy stories” that happens to actors now and then. Someone dropped out of the reading in Pittsburgh, and his agent got a call from the show’s creators, whom he had never met, asking, “Hey, can you get to Pittsburgh in 12 hours?”
creators Dan Lipton and David Rossmer. (Image: Matt Polk)
And so he left New York and came back to the site of his college days and his first big break – as “man in bar” in the 2015 Pittsburgh-filmed Russell Crowe-Amanda Seyfried movie Fathers & Daughters, earning his union card in the process.
It was his senior year at CMU, and it felt “monumental,” Nicholas said. Adding that an actor can measure how much a job means by the celebration that followed, he said that landing a spot in The Book of Mormon “felt like an arrival. That definitely was massive.”
The calls for the Spark Festival reading and then to repeat the role of Perfect Mate – in the show’s first production, at the Greer Cabaret Theater February 2-March 17, 2024 – caught Nicholas at the perfect time.
His initial reaction to the script, he recalled, was, “I love this. This is incredible. And it’s a rare opportunity where you get to kind of be the leading man and also be the character actor who plays five or six roles, because The Perfect Mate morphs throughout the show.”
The musical marked the beginning of “a creative match” with creators Lipton and Rossmer that has continued on the development of three more musicals. Nicholas said he loves the interplay in the rehearsal room with the team, where “the best joke wins.”
With The Perfect Mate, “You always just hope that there’s a future for it, and you hope that you’ll be a part of it,” he said. “And when I got the call about a month ago that they were putting it up, I was over the moon that they’d come back to me.”
Chicago native Nicholas concluded his role on season 11 of Chicago Fire, in 2022, with (spoiler alert) a death scene that had fans reeling, judging by the Internet’s heartbreak.
As the charming, likable Evan, who was initially slated for three episodes on Chicago Fire, Nicholas was granted a 20-episode arc and a love story with series regular Hanako Greensmith.
When the writers’ ax fell, Nicholas was given six weeks to prepare for the end of his character – in a building collapse while trying to rescue an elderly man. Despite his departure, the actor had nothing but good things to say about his time on the show.
“I’ll absolutely continue to just go on and on and on about how much I love the people at Chicago Fire, because they really do see it as a family, from the producers all the way down,” he said. “From the moment that I showed up, they treated me as family. And so in that process [of saying goodbye] as well, they showed a real loyalty. As soon as they knew that they were going to do it, they told my agents and then they called me personally, and I had about two months to process it before we shot it.”
in Chicago Fire on NBC. (Image: NBC)
His character’s death, he feels, honored the relationship that was developed between Chief Hawkins and paramedic Violet Mikami meant
“Once you’ve garnered all this goodwill towards two people on a show, you either have to make that a staple of the show or you have to do something dramatic and tragic to it, because anything else would’ve felt dishonest and would’ve been a disservice to all the good writing that they had done towards our relationship,” Nicolas said. “So they made that choice, and again, every single person in management explained to me how tough it was, and those are all people that I will see as friends and family in some cases for life. I’m really grateful, it was an incredible ride.”
By giving his character closure, Nicholas could move forward without waiting and wondering to see if there was a future for his character.
In the meantime, there are always podcasts to be recorded, sometimes with CMU classmates such as Tony nominee and The Gilded Age actor Denee Benton, or Riverdale’s Casey Cott, currently starring in Broadway’s Moulin Rouge!
The fitness competitions come from Nicholas’ desire to take control of his life, apart from acting. As an actor or team player, you exercise trust and faith in the creativity and control of a director, a coach or a process.
He noted that many actors take a path to directing or producing for just this reason. For Nichlas, the podcast was one step in giving him a sense of control.
All the while, the former football and basketball player was training on his own, keeping physically fit. He ran “a bunch of” marathons, twice in Pittsburgh, and hired a trainer to prepare him for a grueling Spartan competition in New Jersey. He took eighth place.
“And I was like, ‘Wow, I’m pretty good at this.’ And I then was like, ‘Well, what if I try to run three of these a year?’ And next thing you know I qualified for World Championships for Spartan, and I still run those.”
That’s when Hyrox invited him to compete, and Nicholas won the Chicago fitness competition in 2022. He then headed to Manchester, England, where he qualified for the 2024 championships in France.
“So it started off as just an act of defiance of the way this business runs, and it reminded me to cultivate things in my life that I get to do and I have complete choice and control over,” Nicholas said. “Physical fitness is that in general, you get exactly what you put in out of it. And acting sometimes can be the opposite of that. I can film 50 auditions and get no jobs, so that can feel extremely defeating, vs. if I do 50 reps of something, I will get stronger. …”
It’s at this point that Nicholas explains that he has no qualms about adding to his workload because he is an “and” person, not an “or” person.
And … next up, is The Perfect Mate in Pittsburgh, with a cast that includes Josey Miller, Marissa Buchheit and Ryan Cavanaugh.
The show about looking for love is perfectly placed in Pittsburgh CLO’s schedule for Valentine’s Day. But that doesn’t mean it’s only a date-night show, said The Perfect Mate. It’s also a show for people still searching for connection.
And, Jimmy Nicholas adds, the new PCLO musical “is very mysterious and kind of sexy, but it’s also just this very funny show. And, I mean, anytime you’re bringing a date to a night on the town, I think comedy’s a good way to go.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Pittsburgh CLO’s premiere of The Perfect Mate will be at the Greer Cabaret Theater, Downtown, February 2-March 17, 2024. Tickets: $35-$55. As https://www.pittsburghclo.org/buy-tickets or at 412-456-6666.
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