Interview: Eden Espinosa on Her First Tony Nomination for ‘Lempicka’ and the Emotional Challenge of the Role [VIDEO]

“I just remember squealing,” laughs Eden Espinosa when recalling her reaction to hearing her name read as a nominee for this year’s Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.

Espinosa has been with the new original musical Lempicka for just over a decade, playing the painter Tamara de Lempicka, whose sensual art deco portraits of women Espinosa first recognized “mostly from Madonna’s [music] videos.” The giddiness that she felt turned bittersweet only a couple of days later when producers announced that the show would be closing in a little over two weeks. The show’s themes about art and ownership have especially resonated with her at this time. “I’m grateful that we had these words and these themes to hang onto and to literally hold close to our hearts while we were actually living these moments,” she says, noting that she quotes one of the show’s lyrics often: “We do not control the world, we control one flat rectangle of canvas at a time. I am the canvas at the moment and all I can do is control my work and what I put out there for people, and that’s that.”

Lempicka’s difficult, varied emotional terrain presented a challenge to the actress on several fronts. First, she had to prioritize Tamara’s emotional truth over note-perfect singing: In the first half of Lempicka’s first act alone, Tamara endures the Russian revolution, is forced by a soldier to sell her body to free her husband from prison, and nearly starves to death on the streets of Paris. “I don’t ever want to sacrifice an emotional moment for the execution of a pretty note,” she says. “I just try to do a cannonball, and if it happens to come out great, awesome. If it doesn’t, it’s okay too, because these emotions are charged with real human feelings that are messy and not always going to be perfect.” She also had to deal with emotional vulnerability of a different sort in the first act finale, which involves an intimate sex scene with her co-star and fellow Tony nominee Amber Iman. She offers high praise to the work of intimacy coordinators, and credits Ann James, who worked on Lempicka, with giving her the tools necessary to “help us separate and be sane emotionally.”

Even though she’s been with Lempicka for eleven years, Espinosa says that it wasn’t until the Broadway run that she felt like “everything for me and [Tamara] came together with a synergy.” We talked about changes made to the show over the years, how she found the voice of the character, and the scandalous dinner parties Tamara threw that she wished could have been included in the show.

The Original Broadway Cast Recording of Lempicka will be available for streaming and purchase on July 5 courtesy of Sony Masterworks Broadway.