Nik Walker knows that playing the role of Aaron Burr on a national tour of Hamilton is a tremendous opportunity and he is determined to enjoy it. “Being in Hamilton demands your full physical, mental, and emotional attention. You know you are in the big leagues being in this show,” he commented. “Having a role like this does not happen on a regular basis. If I finish my tenure as Burr and I didn’t enjoy myself, that would be a crime. I have to enjoy being at this level.”
Growing up in Boston, Walker always loved books, movies, and stories. To this day, he references multiple literary works and movies in telling his own story. He says it wasn’t his love of story-telling that first brought him to the theater, but his mother’s concern that he may have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). “She put me in my first play, a community production of Winnie the Pooh,” he recalled. “She thought that it would help me focus. I already knew something about the public eye since she was a news anchor. The magic of theater for me was immediate. I fell in love with storytelling.”
Finding his passion at such a young age helped propel him to follow his dreams. “What it comes down to is whether or not you are willing to take a moment and listen to your passion throughout your life,” he remarked. “Your passion may change and there may not be one big answer. I know where I am centered now, but that could change down the road. Passion is about listening to yourself and not being afraid to follow it.”
For 14 months beginning in September 2016, Walker was an understudy for multiple Hamilton roles on Broadway, including for the role of Burr, at that time played by Brandon Victor Dixon. He had previously appeared in the Broadway version of Motown the Musical. “Being able to do what you love and pay your bills at the same time is incredible. Being on Broadway and in Hamilton are amazing, but this isn’t something that happens often for performers,” he remarked. “I got into this business because I love it. My number one rule is ‘don’t ever follow the money.’”
NYU
Walker continued to perform throughout his adolescent and teenage years and then applied to NYU, which turned out to be a great decision despite his naivete about the college application process.
“I was not smart with my college selection,” he laughed. “I didn’t look anywhere else. NYU was the only school I applied to and I didn’t even know anything about it. All I knew was that a lot of people who did film and theater went there. I look back now and say to myself, ‘What were you doing? You are just fortunate that it worked out so well.’”
It is highly probable that had Walker applied to numerous colleges, he would have chosen NYU anyway, but it did have challenges at first. “Going to NYU is not the traditional idea of going to college. What it really means is you are in New York City taking classes,” he said. “It was jarring for me at first. With the size of the school, it is easy to get lost in it.”
Instead of getting lost, Walker found his way that would lead him down his current career path. “What I loved most was that I was put in the rooms with professors who said to be aggressive about what you want to learn,” he recollected. “They would say not to depend on them, that there was no reason to wait, and that we should go out and find what we wanted.”
It is common for Walker to call the teachers he met through NYU and thank them. “I would not be where I am without them,” he said appreciatively. “I learned that theater is a craft and a business, and they taught me how to work in this business.”
One of his most important mentors was Louis Scheeder, the founder and director of The Classical Studio in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Drama, who began teaching at the school in 1989 and retired as Associate Dean of Faculty on August 31, 2017 (He continued teaching and is retiring from that role at the end of this semester).
“Nik Walker was one of the best students I have encountered at NYU,” Scheeder stated. “He was always on time and always prepared, prompt beyond belief.”
“When I teach others, I teach what he taught me. The information was just so valuable,” said Walker, who made sure that attending Scheeder’s retirement celebration was part of his negotiation for his national tour role of Burr. “I told them I will not be at the show that day. I needed to be there for him.”
Scheeder and Kent Gash, the founding director of Tisch School of the Arts’ New Studio on Broadway, were his main influences in college. “They in particular, shaped my education,” he stated. “I will never pretend to be an overnight sensation. It took me 10 years to get this kind of role (Burr) and that is a pretty short time in comparison to many others. I am very proud of the ‘slow and steady to win the race’ concept that I learned at NYU.”
New students in the Tisch School of the Arts are assigned to one of the eight primary training studios for two years. “I felt fortunate to be placed in the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, which I think is one of the best,” he commented. “I think one of the things that helped me the most, especially on Broadway, was that I never studied musical theater. I studied Shakespeare and classical text instead.”
Walker also took his mother’s advice to not just study his own profession. “One of the things I loved about NYU was that you were surrounded by so many other students. Right near you is someone studying art history or solving quadratic equations,” he articulated. “There was one semester where I didn’t do any theater at all. I took other classes just to learn. I didn’t do particularly well in some of those classes, but I was just so happy to be learning.”
The Stella Adler Studio mission of nurturing artists who prioritize humanity was a good fit for Walker. “The biggest sinkhole for actors is to only understand the universe that is them. There is a whole world out there that has nothing to do with you, which in a sense, has everything to do with you,” he expressed.
“You can’t just study yourself. In this age of social media, it is very tempting to manufacture and curate an image of yourself that you can sell. Get off yourself, learn empathy, and learn about the world so that your career and your life will be much more fulfilling. That is an NYU lesson. Use that lesson and learn about the whole world.”
THE PATH TO BROADWAY
During his senior year, Walker and some friends started their own theater company and started an LLC (limited liability corporation), but if folded after three months. “We did two shows and they were good shows,” recollected Walker, who still has the posters from those shows. “There is that ‘cold shower’ of realizing you are not in school anymore. You should actually want that cold shower feeling because it spurs you on.”
One critical thing he did during his senior year at NYU was get an agent. “It was huge to have representation in getting auditions right away and being put in the right rooms,” he relayed. His first union member job was with TheaterWorksUSA and he vividly recalls his humble beginnings in the business. “We were staying in Super 8’s and Red Roof Inns, making $250 a week, and traveling in a van with five stage actors and a stage manager.” The actors built their own sets and put on their own costumes, performing anywhere from a civic center to a school cafeteria, changing in the kitchen.
“That experience really taught me that theater can be anywhere and anything. Building your own set, you quickly learn to appreciate how much work that is. We survived it, being young and stupid,” he laughed. One other important byproduct the experience provided was an Equity card, which proves membership in the Actors’ Equity Association, which represents those who perform live theater.
The combination of learning to sing listening to rock bands, taking opera lessons when he was young, and his acting skills he honed at NYU put Walker in an enviable position. “Being able to sing and dance was a huge help. I was able to get principle roles early in regional theater and off-Broadway shows. It made me learn very fast as I was often the baby among veterans,” acknowledged Walker. “I put my learning cap on. I said, ‘Let me not pretend like I know anything.’ Everything was a lesson. I was a voracious learner.”
One of the most memorable shows he performed in was a Des McAnuff musical Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, a rock opera at the La Jolla Playhouse, a theater on the University of California San Diego that McAnuff revived in 1983. The show was based on an album by the rock band The Flaming Lips. Walker played the boyfriend of a young Japanese girl (Kimiko Glenn), who finds out early in the story that she has cancer. “There were these 30-foot tall pink robots and being a comic book nerd, I was in heaven,” Walker recalled. “I was very young. Kimiko, Paul Nolan (who played the main character’s ex-boyfriend), and I were all impressionable artists and we wanted to create. While the show was running, we would try new things and the performances grew.”
“I met Nik for the first time when I took him and my ex-wife’s son Luke Humphrey, a wonderful actor in his own right, out for dinner when they went to NYU together,” McAnuff recalled. The production’s casting director/facilitator came across Walker when he was just getting out of school. “People were excited about him and it was a coincidence that she found him apart from our previous connection,” McAnuff said. “A lot of us think Yoshimi was the one show that got away from us.”
McAnuff, who has won Best Director Tony Awards for Big River and The Who’s Tommy, was not always thrilled with the trio’s improvising and gave Walker a review he would never forget. “He told me, ‘You are not trusting that you are enough.’ That resonated with me,” Walker stated. “For young men of color, we often don’t believe that we are interesting just by ourselves. That was a huge help on the way to Hamilton.”
“I have watched him since Yoshimi and he just continues to deepen and grow as an actor,” McAnuff commented. “The things he went through are common with younger actors, thinking you have to cover yourself to be adequate. You just have to be in touch with who you are, drawing on your own humanity. He is a gifted and charismatic performer. I am not surprised that he has ended up in that spectacular part (Aaron Burr). That is really good casting.”
HAMILTON
Walker’s initial audition for Hamilton was for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s original project called The Hamilton Mixtape. “I knew of Lin from In the Heights (a Tony-winning Broadway production that Miranda wrote the music and lyrics for), but I was more comfortable with The Rolling Stones than hip-hop,” he expressed. “This was not my kind of language. I felt like I was putting something on. They had just begun their Broadway run and they needed to replace an understudy. I was thinking I wasn’t going to get it.”
His outlook changed after a conversation with a friend. “He told me that the words are just heightened verse, like Shakespearean text. Once that clicked, I knew I could do it,” he recounted. “That is the power of Hamilton. I can do what Nik does and I don’t have to try to be Leslie (Odom, Jr., who played the original Aaron Burr on Broadway). I just try to be me. Sometimes I would receive notes that I was trying too hard. The producers and directors are very smart with their casting and finding men and women who naturally connect with these characters. The road to this show is one of confidence and love of self that you cannot fake.”
Referring to himself as a “grand collector of big brothers,” Walker surrounds himself with mentors he trusts to give him sage advice. One of them is James Monroe Iglehart, who took over the Hamilton roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson on Broadway in 2017 and previously earned a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of the genie in the original Broadway production of Aladdin.
“Nik Walker is one of the brightest, most sincere brothers I have met in a long time,” Iglehart said. “He lives for a good story whether it’s his own or someone else’s. He is always striving to be better, which is funny because he is already an amazing husband, friend, writer, and performer. I just love the guy!”
“At one point, I suffered a calf injury. This show is going to hurt you. You will come up against something and you just accept that,” Walker remarked. “You still have to perform. There was a time in Portland that I just had a full-on breakdown and James talked to me about forgiving myself for being human, to understand something is going to happen during the show, and that I needed to allow myself to not be perfect. Once he said that, it took the pressure off. Doing a show while sick or hurt is only not enjoyable if I beat myself up for being sick or hurt.”
Another thing that Iglehart impressed upon him was not so much whether you have what he called you’re A, B, or C game on, but whether you give your best every time you are on stage. “He described the ‘A game’ is when everything is as you want it, your voice and body are right where you want them to be,” Walker stated. “The ‘B game’ is when you may be a little tired or perhaps had an argument with someone that day. Then there is the ‘C game’ where you can’t hit certain notes, your body and/or voice are tired or maybe you are hurt. What I need to ask myself every night is ‘Did I give you the best with what I had at that moment?’ It may have been 60 percent of my best, but it was all I had to give that night.”
“Nik also have an acute sense of right and wrong and fairness,” Iglehart remarked. “I love that about him!” For all their love and mutual respect for one another, Walker and Iglehart also enjoy having fun at the other’s expense. “Last but not least, he is the most fun to scare and prank! I could scare Nik for the rest of my life and never get tired of it,” he added.
Walker believes there are many lessons to be learned from Hamilton. “We are in an age where everyone wants to be noticed,” he said. “The generation right after me is saying, ‘Look at me, I’m here, I exist.’ The problem is if you don’t know you exist, it doesn’t matter who else knows you do. In the show, Alexander Hamilton put pressure on himself to create something amazing and it took the death of his son for him to finally slow down and enjoy what he had built. Just by waking up this morning, you have done something miraculous. Give yourself permission to enjoy that and the rest is icing.”
Many performers can relate to the questions people ask Walker. “People say, ‘So when are we going to seeing you at the Tony’s or the Oscars?’ That is what success means to them,” he verbalized. “For me success is waking up and being happy with myself. We have to be able to say that you are a good person and that you are worth joy and happiness. Be good with yourself. To me, it means playing the best Aaron Burr I can play. Anything beyond that is not helpful for my three hours on stage.”
(Peggy Mariah) of Hamilton Tour (Philip Company)
In an early evaluation in college, Walker was told that he would have a good career, but there will be a cost. He relates it to part of the story in the 2006 Christopher Nolan film The Prestige. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale plated the roles of young magicians and were fascinated by an older man’s trick to seemingly make a fishbowl appear out of nowhere. The key to the trick was that the man would wobble to and from the table with the fishbowl between his legs. The cost to the older magician was that, though he could walk perfectly fine, he had to wobble even when he wasn’t performing to make the illusion seem real. “That is how I have thought of playing Burr,” Walker related. “The trick is to make the audience believe it is easy and effortless, but the work is the 21 hours every day that I am not performing. For the road shows, we perform twice on Saturday and Sunday. Combined with the Friday night performance, we call it a five-show weekend. That’s where the magic trick comes in.”
Walker does not take for granted how great playing the part of Burr is. “I remember Lin debated about whether to play Burr or Hamilton. Burr has the best songs and the more human element,” he described.
“Hamilton is the best of us. Burr is the one who has jealousy, envy, and manipulation, but we understand they all come out of insecurity, fear, and pressure. The best part of playing him is his contradiction of both loving and hating Hamilton. Burr is evil, but human. He’s devastatingly human.”
CONVERSATION OVER IMAGE
Walker is very active on social media, but in a way that differs from many others. “It is important to curate your page(s), but I don’t mean it in the way some people do,” he commented. “People are listening to me so I have to determine what I want to put out there. There are aspects of my personal life that are mine. I don’t care to share them. I don’t want to share too many of my dinners with my wife or even be on my phone when I am having dinner with her. I was a kid of color growing up in white Irish Boston and I have a lot to unpack in my relationship to race. I ask more questions than there are answers for. To me, asking the question is much more important than having all the answers. I choose to state a fact and hope that it leads people to ask questions.”
After his wife sent him a video on empathy that reminded him he had not thought of the true definition in a while, Walker related it to a scene in the television series West Wing. Leo McGarry (portrayed by John Spencer) was the chief of staff for President Josiah Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen) and he told a story about a man who fell into a hole. A doctor came by and threw a prescription in the hole, a priest came back and threw a prayer in the hole, but a third man came by and got in the hole with the fallen man. “That’s what we have too little of. We are lacking that empathy,” Walker stated. “It takes vulnerability to get in the hole, whether you have the answer or not. We form a connection when we get in that hole with someone else.”
Throughout Black History Month, Walker posted photos of African-Americans who had died. “I didn’t say anything about who killed them. It was just about them and that it was an understatement to say the circumstances in which they died were less than fair,” he recounted. “I was just putting it out there. It was not about guilt, but about understanding the pain and connecting with that pain. You have to take a step outside of yourself. Critical thinking and empathy are rolled into one. It would be a mistake for me to lead anyone to think a certain way. What will save the world, regardless of political leaning, is critical thinking. We are sorely lacking that right now.”
After Greenbook was awarded “Best Picture” by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Walker posted his feelings about it and followed that up with a video further describing the issue. “There were three movies touching on race and black-white relations, two by black filmmakers (BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther) and one from a white male point of view,” he explained. “They all worked their butts off, but they gave the Oscar to the white-centric version. The Academy is on the world stage and that choice was a message, that it is not just about craft and filmmaking. People were telling me that my having a problem with it was a problem in and of itself so that’s why I made the video.”
One of the outlets for Walker’s own experiences, including race relations, is writing plays and it is one of his favorite things to do when he is on the road. “The plays are gaining traction. Mostly what I write about is, in some variation, my growing up like I did. The stories that come out are hard sells,” he admits. “They don’t have easy answers, but those are the stories and characters I have always been drawn to.”
Two of his favorite Shakespearean characters are Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus. “They are magnificent because Shakespeare shows the reasons why they became villains,” he explained. “He showcased again and again how Shylock was pushed to the point of doing terrible things. Aaron is a sociopath, but we see that over and over how he was mistreated as a black man among the Romans. Even with villains, there are not always easy answers.”
It was another Shakespearean play, the 2005 Broadway revival of Julius Caesar that left a lasting impression on Walker. “It starred Denzel Washington and I was one of many people waiting by the stage door to see him. When he came out, everyone was taking photos and trying to talk to him,” he recalled. “Then I saw Kelly AuCoin, who played Octavius. I loved his performance and I had a question about Antony and Cleopatra. He took 5-to-10 minutes to talk to me, just some kid. I never forgot that and hit him up on Twitter once to tell him that meant the world to me. That’s how we should be talking to young people, taking time for them, letting them know that their dreams are within their reach and that it is right there for them.”
Whatever the future holds for Walker, his goal remains the same. “I know how tempting it is to chase fame. I am not chasing fame. My first website had a mission statement that said I want to work on having a good reputation,” he stated. “That is more than enough for me and the opportunities that have come so far have been tremendous.”
Despite his success and playing one of the best-known roles in the world, Walker’s proudest moment dates back to the La Jolla days with Des McAnuff. “We had a huge opening for the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. My mom came and was on the red carpet with me. Des came up to her and told her, ‘Your son is very talented, but the best thing about him is that he is a good guy.’ That meant more to me than any accolades or reviews. That is what really matters.”