Jason Schmidt knows how to lure you in. From the moment his The Outsiders character “Sodapop” appears on the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre stage, you’re following his every move. Small gasps from the crowd bounce you in and out of the moment, with young girls giggling as he makes a joke or glides across the Broadway stage.
His overly charming, boisterous, and lover-boy stage persona might have skyrocketed his stardom, but off the stage, Schmidt is keeping his feet on the ground. After spending days researching the show on TikTok, I almost don’t recognize him when we meet around the corner from his day job in the thick of Times Square as he slips through the front doors of the hotel lobby, his head tucked low under a baseball cap.
“I think I'm what they call a performative introvert,” he tells Teen Vogue. “I love people, I'm invested in people, but that recharge time alone is so important to me.” It’s also quite necessary when you’re putting on an incredibly heart-breaking two-and-a-half-hour show eight times a week.
After what's been a whirlwind opening six months of performing in The Outsiders, finding the balance between being a Broadway star and a normal 23-year-old with a budding social life has been one of the greatest challenges for Schmidt. “Literally, it’s hard,” he says. “With the Broadway schedule and only having that one day off, the exhaustion of it all can be a lot. Finding time to actually hang out with people can be hard. It can be so much easier to just go home, nap, watch a movie, or write some music. But then I have to be like, ‘Okay, I'm going to go crazy in a different way if I don't see friends, go on dates, things like that.’”
With a 5:30 p.m. call time — and a 12:30 p.m. for his two-a-days on Wednesday and Saturday — Schmidt likes to spend his morning before shows at a coffee shop somewhere in the East Village, where he currently resides, preferably reading a book. The neighborhood, notably filled with 20-somethings, has become the prime spot for young people looking for a social life. Still, Schmidt has not experienced much of it. “My experience so far with it has been getting off the train after a show,” he says between laughs.
The Outsiders musical is based on the 1967 novel by S. E. Hinton. The story follows 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis (played by Brody Grant in the Broadway original musical) and his experiences with rival gangs in 1960s Oklahoma. Schmidt plays Sodapop Curtis, Ponyboy’s second oldest brother, who is doing his absolute best to hold him and his two brothers together after tragedy strikes their family. Its 1983 film adaptation was written by Kathleen Rowell, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and led by a star-studded cast that included C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, and Sofia Coppola.
The musical originally premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in California before it got picked up and taken to New York City to join the official Broadway lineup. Its popularity continues to grow with constant sold-out nights and tickets going for anywhere between $90 and $400. During the 2024 season, the male-led production has won four Tony Awards, including the coveted Best Musical. The show’s success has put Schmidt at the center of it all, his Broadway debut setting an impossibly high standard.
“It’s been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schmidt says. “Hopefully, I'll get to be a part of continuously cool things. But for a musical to have a fan base like this and a reach like this, I do think it’s very unique. Even some of the best, most successful musicals don't have this type of fan base — and that's been beautiful to experience. I think we all felt it, even in La Jolla when it was a different show. I still was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has the potential to do great things.’”
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“I'm trying to take it in as much as I can and ground myself,” he says about the growing popularity of the show and his rising fan base. “Individually, it's weird. I'm not going to lie. I think it's so fun and lovely to have the fans be affected the way they are by the show and by my portrayal of this beautiful character. But I also don't always know how to handle it.”
If you’ve come across the galore of fan-made Jason Schmidt videos on TikTok — they almost exclusively are accompanied by a caption about how much they’re “obsessed” or “in love” with the 23-year-old — then you’d understand. And, rest assured, Schmidt has seen the fan edits made of him. “My sister sends me a lot of them,” he says with a grin.
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Schmidt grew up in the suburbs of Illinois, right outside of Chicago. He’s the youngest of four, with three older sisters. His first theater performance was for the local community theater at nine years old — his director wrote a three-hour long The Hobbit musical. He’d go on in theater over the years, falling deeper in love with the community he found there. However, after dealing with an antagonistic theater director in the eighth grade and starting to explore varying sports like basketball, volleyball, and baseball, Schmidt was torn on whether he truly wanted to continue in the arts. He was having his textbook Troy Bolton decision-making moment. “I almost quit [theater] because I was playing basketball, and I thought I was going to do that in college,” he says.
“The community theater was doing Les Mis,” Schmidt recalls. “My mom was like, ‘You've got to do this one last show and then you can quit.’ And I was like, ‘no, I'm quitting, I'm really done with it.’ I was tired of it. As an athlete, you get made fun of for it. And I remember the first time I saw this guy come late to practice in middle school from choir and he just got ripped on by all the other dudes. I remember being like, ‘Well, I'm going to keep it a secret that I do freaking theater then.’ And I did for a little bit. I really loved basketball. And at the time, up until that point, theater had just been for fun and for friends.”
After playing Marius in Les Misérables and working with the director Matt Silar — who’d later become his mentor — Schmidt was hooked on theater. “I found out I was a weirder, more creative kid,” he admits. “My mind was really imaginative. Theater people made me feel like that was normal.”
He then went to Carnegie Mellon for theater, but left halfway through his junior year to play Buddy Aldridge in the Paramount+ original Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. The series premiered in April 2023 and was met with the untimely fate many streaming shows have faced lately: cancellation after the first season. The show’s burgeoning cult-like fanbase was dealt an even worse deck of cards when Paramount announced it would also be removing the show entirely from its streaming platform. This was Schmidt’s first big project and it haphazardly shaped how he approached his excitement with his work thereafter.
“Grease gave me perspective 'cause a lot of people were giving us the talk saying, ‘This is going to be huge, get ready for your life to change,’ that type of thing,” he says. “So, I think from the perspective of that and then moving into Outsiders, people were saying the same thing and I kept being like, ‘Well, I'll believe it when I see it.’ I had the utmost confidence in it but you never know.”
And now we do know. As his Broadway star continues to rise Schmidt is also focused on his personal music career. He’s released singles over the years but is finally trying to take it seriously. His latest single “Growing Up” is out today.
“Matt used to tell me this phrase a lot: ‘Growing up is missing someone everywhere you go,” he continues. “In each of these things that I'm doing, Grease, Outsiders, music, and moving to these different cities, I meet all these beautiful people, I fall in love with them, and then I move on to the next thing. The moving itself, I'm figuring it out — How do I stay connected to people? I think it honestly has a lot to do with choosing the right people because, with my best friends, I don't necessarily call them or text them a lot. I think I struggle with being a little lonely but I've learned to invest in the people that are here and trust the journey that I'm on.”
His music is inspired by multiple genres, from pop to R&B. His sound sits comfortably amongst the Gen Z male singers floating throughout the current music sphere. Daryl Tofa (who plays “Two-Bit” in the Broadway production) is sitting alongside Schmidt in their dressing room, laughing with him, saying that the world is waiting for Jason — that Jason Schmidt is up next.
Because of his schedule, his daily routine has gotten almost monotonous. He leaves his apartment around five in the afternoon. Once at the theater he’ll put on some music and dance around with Tofa, who is his best friend and dressing room-mate. He’ll then get his hair done by his stylist, Anna, and then put on his very intricate stage makeup made up of soot and dirt powder. He wears the same costume throughout the entire show but gets to change into a dry version of it during intermission.
Schmidt is continuously trying to revel in the fun of his world amidst the constant show days and music writing. It can be hard to conceptualize the work he’s doing every day, especially as he’s in it.
“'It can be exhausting, the eight shows a week, but it is so beautiful,” he says. “I was talking to Joshua Boone the other day, who plays Dally, and as we're trying to find the rhythm of doing these eight shows, we've become a little more lax with it so that we can live our outside lives as well. We were talking about lowering the stakes a little bit for ourselves, and he was like, ‘God could crack the sky open today and what we're doing here wouldn't really matter.’”
“Then he goes, ‘But at the same time, this story is a story about two sides who don't want to understand each other at all, and who are constantly going to battle,’” Schmidt continues. “The truth of the story is radical compassion. Everyone's an outsider in this story. It's not just Ponyboy, it's not just the greasers, it’s the socs as well because everyone feels misunderstood. They don't have a place in the world. That radical compassion, I think, is so important to the world today.”
Schmidt says that art can make you feel like a human being in a world that feels increasingly fake. Getting to continually put on a show that can make people feel seen or as if they have community is something he’s grateful for every day, even if it is all-consuming.
It’s 45 minutes until Schmidt is set to perform at this Wednesday matinee and someone from production comes through the door handing over a letter: “You’ve got fan mail, Jason.” Schmidt says he gets a letter almost every day. Today’s dispatch is six pages long. They even added a small note on the envelope: “Excited for Growing Up to come out soon.”
Scattered throughout Schmidt’s entire dressing room are stacks of fan-made artwork, friendship bracelets, and custom tote bags. This fanbase they’ve gained through The Outsiders isn’t letting up. But Schmidt enjoys how much they all ride for him, his castmates, and the show itself.
For many who get into theater, a big part of the package is the fashion, the makeup, getting transformed to become an exaggerated version of a character, even if it's just momentarily on stage. While it isn’t the first thing you might think of, clothing tells so much of the story in musicals. It’s our first visual introduction to each character. Schmidt and many of the greasers in the show wear tattered jeans and stained tank tops, signifying not only class but the world they’re coming from. There’s even a whole song just about greasing your hair.
Outside of the stage world, Schmidt isn’t super knowledgeable when it comes to fashion, he admits, at least not just yet. Instead, his style has been fully formed by the hard work of his older sisters. He loves oversized clothing with a preppy feel and is slowly getting into designers like Ralph Lauren. His skin care routine was also made by his sister Tori, who was into beauty and makeup from a young age and gave him a full game plan to tackle his acne issues.
“I’ve got a few moisturizers I’m supposed to be using — I’m using them,” he says with a nervous laugh. “I also have a hydrating serum I’m using, but I’ve been slacking on that one. When I was coming up at the end of high school, [my sister] set up a whole thing for me. Partially because my skin was terrible. It always made me very self-conscious.”
Now Schmidt’s skin has cleared up a lot. He does have some acne scarring across his cheeks, but he says he’s come to love it. “Somebody described it the other day as if it looks like I was in a battle or something,” he laughs. “The guy was like, ‘Yeah, you could say that I'm a pretty basic-looking dude, but you can never say that about yourself because of your scarring.’ I was like, ‘That's really cool. That's the best way anyone's ever put it to me.’”
It’s now only a few minutes before showtime. Tofa and Schmidt are listening to music with their humidifier blasting — a necessary item before any performance — as they lightly sing along to each track that plays. With such a full schedule, taking care of his skin, health and well being is just as important as putting on a good show eight times a week.
Schmidt has spent the last few Mondays flying to Nashville to work on his music only coming back to New York City to spend the rest of his time on stage performing as Sodapop. He wouldn’t consider himself a workaholic, but he does love making the most of his time. By now, I can see the line of show attendees slowly walking into the theater from their dressing room window. There’s an organized chaos backstage as it gets closer to show time — they all know they’re getting to be a part of something truly special. After the shortened run of Grease and having one of the busiest six months ever with The Outsiders, Schmidt now knows what it's like to experience the highs and lows of being an actor and right now he’s fully getting to enjoy the ride — with or without his skin care.
