One of the more surprising team-ups of this Broadway season was surely Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, the stars of Jen Silverman’s two-character comedy-drama that had a limited run last fall. The casting got immediate buzz, not to mention curiosity – LuPone has made no secret of her displeasures with Broadway in recent years, and Farrow has always been an infrequent Broadway performer.

The star of such classic movies as Rosemary’s Baby, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters made her Broadway debut in 1979’s Romantic Comedy opposite Anthony Perkins, and prior to The Roommate return only twice, most recently a monthlong stint in 2014’s Love Letters. The second was in 1996 when a recording of her voice was heard in the short-lived Stephen Sondheim-George Furth play Getting Away With Murder.

It was Sondheim who introduced Farrow to LuPone 30 years ago, and the two actors, who live near one another in Connecticut, became fast and lasting friends. Another old friend, Jack O’Brien, who directed Getting Away With Murder, would bring the two stars back to Broadway for The Roommate.

In the play, Farrow, in a moving, quirky performance that would earn her a Tony Award nomination, played Sharon, a lonely Iowa woman – estranged from her adult son, divorced from her husband – who decides to take a boarder into her large farmhouse. In an Odd Couple-like spin, the boarder is a mysterious New Yorker name Robyn (LuPone) who seems to have skipped town for reasons that only eventually become clear: She’s a con-artist.

As the two slowly open up and become friends, they begin to impact one another’s lives (and personalities) in surprising ways.

In this interview, Farrow talks about her decision to return to Broadway, her friendship with LuPone, and her emotional reaction when she got the news of her first Tony-nomination ever, for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (and what that reaction had to do with her late mother, the actress Maureen O’Sullivan.)

The Roommate, written by Jen Silverman and directed by Jack O’Brien, played at Broadway’s Booth Theatre from September 12, 2024 through December 15, 2024. Farrow’s nomination was the sole one for The Roommate.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

No, it hadn’t crossed my mind, but I got a call from Jack O’Brien, who is an old friend, and of course, a respected director, and he said I have a very interesting script, and I would love for you to do it, and I said I’d read it, and it had come to me several years before, but the timing was…it was impossible for me at the time, but I remember liking it, and I thought there was really a streak of brilliance about it. Anyway, I asked my son Ronan – I confer with him on many, many issues. I said, what do you think? And he read it instantly, and he said I love it, you have to do it, and that was it.

Then it ended up being Patti as the other woman, which I was overjoyed about because Patti is an old friend of mine of 30 years, and I can’t imagine a better person to be on stage with. As it turned out, I was absolutely right. Certainly, there could be no better partner to be in a scene with, on a stage with, than Patti LuPone. I feel I lucked out on all levels, and especially I love Jen Silverman’s script. As an actor you look for and rarely find an arc such as the one she built into the play that asked a lot of us, Patti and with me, and you hope for that, you know? And so, I felt I had to grab it.

It had never crossed my mind that I’d be working with Patti, because, I mean, she is the goddess of Broadway, and what a voice, and I’m not a singer, and I rarely did Broadway. I mean, it just never crossed my mind, but we live near each other. Always have. Two of our kids were in the same class at school, at the same school, her son and my son, and I met her on New Year’s Eve, actually. She and her husband gave a New Year’s Eve party, and Steve Sondheim, who was one of my oldest friends, 50 years, he invited me to come to the party at Patti’s 30 years ago, and that’s how I met Patti.

And how did it change on stage? I don’t know if it’s true of every play, but for our play, we had a very abbreviated rehearsal period. I think three weeks is a very little period of time to work on a play of that complexity. Nevertheless, it was a three-week rehearsal, and there were the tech run-throughs and stuff, but that rehearsal period…it really wasn’t until we started doing the play for an audience that Patti and I found our way through. So, if you were to have seen it on opening night, I feel like I apologize, because we continued to inhabit that kitchen in that world, and in the inhabiting that place and time and circumstances, we found a deeper way to go, different things. Different things that were maybe immediately apparent in those three weeks in rehearsal.

You know, no, there wasn’t a second of that. We were on the same trajectory, both of us aiming for the same thing. So, we tried to, without ever talking about it, just inhabit those characters in that place, under those circumstances. The more it evolved, it was funnier than we’d thought, and sadder than we’d thought. So, of course, it never became boring, because of all of us striving to just…you know, even if we had had a 10-week rehearsal, you know, I don’t think you would ever get bored because there’s always, you know, discovery and falling short of your own best hopes, and sometimes, you know, getting it really right and feeling great about it. You know, every show is different, as different as every audience, but you know, Patti and I, before we did each show, we had a little ritual we would do backstage.

We had this little ritual every night. Patti loves to look at the audience before going on, seeing who’s out there and all that. Not I. I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. She knew not to tell me. Then we would do a little prayer, and we would do a hug, and then we would say let’s have fun, and then we would go out on stage. It was Patti’s idea, because Patti’s the old Broadway pro, to walk out on stage before the play started to get the initial applause, to just come out and receive the applause so that it doesn’t happen during our first scene entrance when we enter the kitchen to begin the play, when applause kind of interrupts the moment you hoped for.

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Well, I just don’t know. I just don’t want to see faces. I was in a play for a year on Broadway in 1980. It was called Romantic Comedy, and after many months, I did want to know because it did make me a little nervous, which was, at that point, a good thing, because if you’re doing eight shows a week for a year, that little uplift, that little jolt of, “Oh my gosh, Ingrid Bergman’s in the audience” kind of thing was good. That happened.

I think it was Patti who said that, in the New Yorker, that she said she would never go back. I hope it’s not true, but it might be. I hope she changes her mind, because I want to see more of Patti LuPone on stage.

What was your reaction to getting the Tony nomination?

FARROW: Honestly, I never in my wildest…I certainly didn’t consider the possibility of that, and early on, Patti, who does consider such things being such a creature of the theater and having shelves full of awards, she said I don’t think we’re going to get any Tony nominations because we’re closing mid-December, and the Tonys aren’t until June, by which time, our little play will be long forgotten. I’m like, oh, well, you know, let’s just have fun anyway, you know?

When the Tony nomination came, I was washing my hair, and the phone’s ringing.I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember that, afterwards, my thought, strangely maybe, went to my mom. I now live alone with a puppy, not far from family members, but my own little cottage, and I wanted to tell my mom, because there’s no one in my life who’s been more in my corner, and there’s no one I can think of that would’ve been happier about that or more proud, so I had a moment of missing my mom and wanting to tell her. I started crying, you know? I think I was pretty overwhelmed by the nomination itself, and I just thought of how happy she would’ve been and how happy I was. There was something unreal about it.

DEADLINE: So you’d come back to Broadway?

FARROW: Well, it would depend if there was something that was as worth that long journey, you know? To do a play is a huge demand. I went from my hotel room to the dressing room to the stage, back to the dressing room, out the door, back to the hotel room for months. I did nothing else. I didn’t drink coffee. I didn’t hang out with people. I didn’t have any wine or anything, and I would order food from the takeout places near the hotel or near the theatre. There’s no outside life.

I was thinking back to when I did the other plays. I would see people afterward and stuff, and so this time I brought, like, good suits, you know, some of my better things in case I go out to dinner. But that was not at all on the agenda because I just had to stay in the zone, frankly.

DEADLINE: What’s next for you? It’s clear audiences wanted to see you, and now with the nomination, it must’ve felt like a very warm welcome.

FARROW: It did, and of course, that was actually surprising, really, because, you know, I live in the country. It’s a very different life from being in New York or being on Broadway. I felt very grateful, and there wasn’t one show that Patti and I gave that there wasn’t a standing ovation, you know? They seemed to love the show, and I really credit Jen Silverman for giving us that material, every single word of it. Anyway, I don’t know what’s next. There are actors who set up their own production company and line up their work and all that, but I never did that.

There were long periods of my life, maybe most of it, where I was engaged in other things, you know, like raising children or working with UNICEF. I did a documentary on Darfur, on the testimony of the people, the refugees coming out of Darfur. But now I actually have a great gift, and that is I’m really good at doing nothing, and by nothing I mean I read, I listen to music, I have a dog, I see the grandchildren, I take walks.

Patti says she needs to work all the time, and I imagine if I had that voice, I’m sure I would, too. So, I don’t know. If something good comes my way, like how The Roommate kind of fell in my lap thanks to Jack O’Brien, I would do it if it was good. But it’s a big undertaking. It is huge. But it’s also extremely gratifying.

And Patti and I never had a negative moment, by the way. Working together didn’t change our friendship. I think our friendship is deeper now.