Eva Noblezada and Reeve Carney have gone through hell and back to be together. The Broadway power couple first met while surviving the horrors of the underworld in Hadestown before traveling to Weimar Republic Germany in Cabaret. Now, they’re hurtling through time together yet again, dropped into the decadent Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby.
Carney and Noblezada first crossed paths in London in 2017, at a chemistry read to play the star-crossed lovers in Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s reimagining of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. They reprised their roles when the show transferred to Broadway the following year, receiving critical acclaim and 14 Tony nominations for its jazz and folk-infused score and moodily atmospheric staging. (A proshot of the musical, featuring other original cast members, was recorded in London last year, and will be released in theaters on July 24.)
This success was nothing new to the performers. Noblezada had skyrocketed to fame after starring as Kim in the 2017 revival of Miss Saigon on the West End and Broadway, and Carney wrote and performed songs in a self-titled band before playing the title role in the infamously troubled musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. He then joined the cast of the Gothic horror series Penny Dreadful, playing Dorian Gray.
Nearly nine years after that fateful meeting in London, their chemistry is still apparent. Sitting side by side in Noblezada’s dressing room before a matinee of The Great Gatsby—in which they both currently star—the two seamlessly finish each other’s sentences while affectionately touching legs or arms and laughing at each other’s antics.
“You always hear stories about people actually getting together in real life, how it can mess up their chemistry on stage or on screen,” Carney says, recalling the early, furtive days of their romance as Hadestown costars. (After announcing their engagement during a concert in New York last spring, they married in New Orleans in October.) “The only thing that presented any hesitation at all at that point was, ‘Oh, no, we don’t want to mess up the show. Thankfully, people didn’t feel that way.”
Still, Noblezada takes care to maintain some distance between her personal life and her character work. “I always say that the biggest compliment you can give me is, ‘You completely disappeared in your role,’” she says. “I’ve done this before in other roles, when I was finding my feet as an actress, [thinking], ‘This part of the show, she feels this, and I feel like this in my life. So why don’t I bring myself in this moment?’ It’s like your past self that has experienced this emotional trauma that you're trying to show on stage is fighting and conflicting with your character. Then it becomes messy, and I feel like it loses a lot of focus and claritys from a performance perspective.”
She and Carney avoid that messiness with boundaries around their personal lives, despite their public displays of affection over social media. “We are quite private,” Carney says.
“Reeve and I are very intentional, and we don’t like to, in some ways, have our foods touch in certain things of our life,” adds Noblezada, reflecting on the contrast between herself and Eurydice. Where she finds safety in their marriage, her character was a guarded young woman focused on survival and skeptical of Orpheus’s romantic pursuit.
“Reeve and I have so much trust together that it was interesting and fun to play against the falling-in-love part. The softening into the vulnerability and intimacy that [Eurydice] has not really experienced made it so much more beautiful and symbiotic, making sure that it’s not Reeve and Eva on stage. It’s strictly how Orpheus and Eurydice would have interacted with each other.”
The pair explored a different type of collaboration when they joined Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of the Kander & Ebb classic Cabaret in London last year. Noblezada stepped into the role of the tragically vivacious nightclub singer Sally Bowles, but rather than playing her unlikely lover Cliff, Carney was cast as the impishly sinister Emcee of the Kit Kat Club.
Given their relatively little stage time together, the two savored the opportunity to admire each other’s performance. “Reeve was so good in that role!” Noblezada almost shouts, before continuing, “I’ve seen this man do so much, and I’ve only really known him nine years. I’ve seen him do a plethora of things, and I’ve gone back and watched almost his entire filmography, and his talent and genius truly know no bounds... my favorite part of the show every day was turning up the Tannoy backstage and hearing the audience go crazy, and then hearing him sing ‘Willkommen.’”
Starkly contrasting with Cabaret's ominous allusions to the rising tide of fascism, The Great Gatsby sees Carney play the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby, and Noblezada his lost love and golden girl, Daisy Buchanan. While Noblezada has returned to Daisy, having originated the role in the spring of 2024 before departing the show in January 2025, Carney is a new addition to the cast, playing the iconic character for the first time.
He’s hardly a stranger to the show, which he saw 14 times during Noblezada’s first run. He is also something of a natural for the role: Carney laughs while sharing that when he first tasted caviar as a baby, he immediately demanded more.
“You always want to be true to the story, first and foremost,” he says, “but then find the way in which you can bring that truth to this best point of claritys with what you can bring naturally.”
Returning to the decadence of Jay Gatsby's parties has introduced new aspects of the show to Noblezada. “I think that’s one of the beauteous things about doing eight shows a week for a long time is that you get time to work on things and see how far you can stretch something,” she says. “When one thing changes, it might inspire something else. Plant a new seed for Act Two, and you're like, ‘Oh, there’s just endless possibilities with how a show can go.’”
The musical, which features music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, and a book adapted by Kait Kerrigan, veers from the novel’s plot at times to further develop its characters, including Daisy. “Kate talked a lot about how Daisy has a voice in the show, and she has autonomy. You get to hear her inner thoughts, which didn’t really happen in the book,” Noblezada says. “But she still suffers the same reality as the book-everyone else has a little bit of freedom, and Daisy does not.”
In this telling, she is steeped in the grief and regret of being trapped in an unhappy marriage-a register made all the more interesting and complex by Noblezada's emotional distance from it. “She’s such a shell, sometimes,” she says of Daisy. “I feel like I have the budget to add to that sadness because I feel so happy.”
Daisy’s situation is best articulated in the song “Beautiful Little Fool,” when she hopes that her daughter will go through life unaware of the limitations of being a woman.
“It’s my favorite song to sing,” Noblezada says, “but it’s my least favorite song to perform.”
A notable trend in Carney and Noblezada's onstage history is the tragic fates of their characters. Orpheus and Eurydice do not escape the underworld together, and Jay dies having been forsaken by his long-lost love. But despite all of that, Noblezada says the real-life pair happily reunite after each performance as themselves.
“After a two-and-a-half hour show, most of the time we look at each other and go, ‘Oh, it’s great to see you again.’”
Location: The Times Square Edition. Hair and makeup, Chelsea Gehr. Styling: Emma Pritchard.