A Broadway leading man who landed one large television part and did everything asked of him in it. Matthew Morrison can sing, dance and be earnest at full volume; what Glee never gave him was a settled idea of who Will Schuester was.
Fi1m perspective
Will Schuester writes a word on the whiteboard, the club groans, and then he gets up and performs the point instead of making it. Matthew Morrison spent six seasons of Glee (2009) doing versions of that, and the performing was always the better half. He can sing and dance and is game for anything, and when the programme let him be a stage performer who happened to teach Spanish it was obvious why he had been cast. When it asked him to be a man with a marriage, it was much less sure.
Everything about how he works comes from the theatre. He was on Broadway more than a decade before Glee began, originating Link Larkin in Hairspray (2002) and Fabrizio in The Light in the Piazza (2005), and he went straight back afterwards, playing J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland (2015). We have not reviewed the stage work and will not judge it, but it explains the screen habit: a mark hit, a note held, a smile aimed at the back row. He also directed one episode of Glee in its third season, and since then the television has been guest parts, on Grey's Anatomy, The Good Wife and American Horror Story. Put plainly, the screen career is one large part with a long tail.
The part was the problem, and not his. In the programme Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan built, Will's marriage to Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) is written as a sitcom nightmare and played as one, and nobody ever told Morrison whether Will was the hero or the joke. He chose hero every time, because that is what he has, and the earnestness that makes him believable as a man who would rescue a failing choir is exactly what makes him an easy target when the writers want a laugh. We felt for him, watching the first season again: there are scenes where the script turns on Will and Morrison simply does not notice, and the effect is closer to embarrassment than to comedy. The pupils got the feeling; he got the exposition.
He seems to have known. "I wasn't the hugest fan of season two," he said in 2011, which is a gentler version of our own view. Our advice for the programme stands for him: watch the first year, and in it watch the numbers, because whenever Morrison is singing the character stops being a question and becomes a performer, which is what he is. Nothing on screen since has been as large, and it is hard to see what would be, unless somebody builds him another stage and points a camera at it.
Biography
Matthew Morrison is an American actor, dancer and singer. He was born on 30 October 1978 in Fort Ord, California, and trained at the Orange County School of the Arts before attending New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Morrison began his career on Broadway, appearing in productions including Footloose, Hairspray as Link Larkin, and The Light in the Piazza, for which he received a Tony Award nomination. He played Lieutenant Cable in the Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific and later starred as J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland.
He is best known for playing Will Schuester, the glee club director, in the Fox series Glee (2009–2015), in which he also made his directorial debut. Morrison has appeared in guest roles on series including Grey’s Anatomy and American Horror Story.
