Daniel Breaker is a stage actor the camera has caught properly once, as the gangly, self-pleased Youth in Spike Lee's Passing Strange. It is enough to show what he does: play a boy's vanity for laughs and let the people around him carry the hurt.
Fi1m perspective
In Passing Strange (2009), Breaker plays Youth, the boy Stew once was, and he plays him as gangly, pleased with himself and a little tiring. That is the assignment. Stew stands at the side of the stage with a guitar and is hard on the boy he used to be, and Breaker takes the blows on his behalf: the long limbs never quite under control, the excuse that arrives before the question, the grin that expects to be forgiven. It is a performance built to be judged by the older man in the frame, and Breaker has the nerve to stand there and be judged.
The part is the one he is known for. It took him from the Off-Broadway premiere in 2007 to Broadway in 2008 and then in front of Lee's cameras over the final performances. Before it there were five plays at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington. After it came Broadway musicals, one after another: Donkey in the original Shrek the Musical from 2008, Mafala Hatimbi in The Book of Mormon, Aaron Burr in Hamilton, and from 2025 Hermes, the narrator of Hadestown, on Broadway and then in the West End. We have not seen those through a lens and will not pretend to have. What critics notice across them is consistent: nervy energy, a physical comedian's willingness to look foolish, an outsider's eagerness to be let in. A boy who wants to be an artist and a talking donkey have more in common than the billing suggests.
The Lee film shows both the gift and its edge. Matthew Libatique keeps his cameras at or just below the actors' eye line, and Breaker's face suits that: you can see the self-regard and the doubt underneath it at the same time. The scene that got at us, though, is the one where Youth tells Mother he is leaving Los Angeles, and Libatique stays on Davis while Breaker talks. It moved us, and what moved us was her stillness, not his speech. That is fair to the show, which needs Youth to be the one who does not notice. It also tells you what Breaker is for on screen. He is good at being the person other people react to, and less often the person we react to.
He said once that he always sang but never felt he was cut out for the Broadway musical, and his career since has been a long argument with that sentence. A camera has been pointed at him properly once. Somebody should do it again, and this time keep it on him when the bad news lands.
Biography
Daniel Breaker is an American actor and comedian. Born on 2 June 1980 in Manhattan, Kansas, he trained at the Juilliard School and began his career in 2002.
His first major role was as the Youth in the Off-Broadway premiere of Passing Strange (2007), for which he received an Obie Award; he reprised the part on Broadway (Tony Award nomination) and in Spike Lee's 2009 filmed version. He is also known for playing Donkey in the original Broadway production of Shrek the Musical (2008). Other Broadway credits include principal roles in Hamilton, Hadestown, The Book of Mormon and Once Upon a Mattress.
On screen, Breaker has appeared in films including Limitless (2011) and Sisters (2015), and in television series such as Billions (as Roger 'Scooter' Dunbar), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Mozart in the Jungle and Girls5eva.
