Jonathan Groff is so committed to his craft, he takes the title Spring Awakening literally.
Kelly Clarkson testified to that fact on Tuesday’s episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, in which she regaled the Broadway star with a visceral memory of her time seeing him in the acclaimed musical.
“I saw you in that, and there’s something — I didn’t know there was a name for it — but I was second row, so you probably know where I’m headed,” she began, eliciting a knowing giggle from Groff.
“I was in the second row and I was like, ‘What?'” Clarkson continued, pantomiming a failed effort to dodge incoming rockets of spit.
“There’s a term, and it’s called the ‘Groff sauce,'” the Mindhunter star informed her.
Clarkson told Groff that it “wasn’t just your spit, it was your sweat. I was like, ‘Oh, my god.’ Then I felt like an inferior performer, because I was like, ‘I have never worked that hard. I have never ever worked that hard.'”
Groff conceded, “I am a spitter. I’m a huge spitter, and it’s just what happens to me when I perform…. It’s like everything goes. I just get really into it.”
Clarkson assured a bashful Groff that “after a while, you get used to it,” but he pressed on.
“I have seen audience members take their programs and do this,” he said, holding up his hands as if he was raising a shield.
Groff has been notorious for his overactive salivary glands — a quality he shares with Amy Poehler — since he landed his breakout role in the coming-of-age tragedy by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater in 2006. But it was a quirk largely held dear by Broadway die-hards.
As Groff’s star has risen with starring roles on David Fincher’s Mindhunter and in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, however, the secret’s out. Groff’s spit went viral when he took over the role of King George III from Brian d’Arcy James when the latter musical moved from off to on Broadway in 2015.
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Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele perform onstage with the original cast of ‘Spring Awakening’ in 2022
Groff and his costars in the 2023 Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, discussed this very subject in during an interview at 92Y.
“I can’t believe how patient these two are with the amount of fluid that’s coming at them, and it’s real love, and not a day goes by where I’m not grateful for that,” Groff said. “Because it’s disgusting.”
Reflecting on his Spring Awakening days, Groff echoed Clarkson’s observation that his on-stage excretions aren’t limited only to spit.
“At the end of Act I of Spring Awakening, when I would be in the hayloft with Lea Michele, some days I would be sweating so much, and we were simulating sex,” he recalled. “I would be on top of her in the hayloft, and the water would be coming down my face, and then go to like a low faucet where it’s just dripping in a straight line onto her body…and she would go, ‘Oh my God, get off of me!'”
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