‘The Residence’s Molly Griggs Feels Like Joan of Arc in Her ‘Powerful’ Broadway Opening Night Look (Exclusive)

Molly Griggs is having a moment.

The 31-year-old actress, who stars as the President’s social secretary Lilly Schumacher in the popular Netflix series The Residence, opened Broadway’s John Proctor Is the Villain on Monday, April 14 — and did it in style!

Two days before her opening night at New York City’s Booth Theatre, Griggs exclusively told Parade it’s “been really special to have these two projects happening at the same time.”

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John Proctor Is the Villain is particularly exciting for Griggs given it’s her first time opening a show on the Great White Way following her time as a replacement in the Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!.

“I’m wearing this amazing silver beaded situation from Cucculelli Shaheen that’s unbelievable,” Griggs said of her opening-night ensemble. “It’s so gorgeous and has these amazing cutouts at the hip. We put it on, and we were just like, ‘This!’ It immediately reminded me of Joan of Arc. It kind of looks like this beautiful chainmail armor. It’s actually really heavy! I don’t know how much it weighs, but it just made me feel very powerful and feminine and cool. I love it.”

For her first Broadway opening night, Griggs worked with stylist Andrew Gelwicks to pick out her look. “I talked to him on the phone, and we were kind of bouncing around different ideas,” she explained. “Then I showed up for the fitting, and he had so many beautiful options. It was really just an embarrassment of riches. But there was something about this one that we kept coming back to. I just felt very powerful in it, and I’d never seen something like it. It’s feels like it’s a unique piece.”

The new Broadway play by Kimberly Belflower, in which Griggs stars alongside Stranger Things actress Sadie Sink, takes place in a Georgia high school in 2018 during the #MeToo movement. The class is reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible — in which John Proctor is sentenced to death for witchcraft — and Griggs plays a young guidance counselor named Bailey Gallagher.

“She’s like 24. It’s her first job out of college, and she’s doing her best, but she’s in a little over her head with all of the challenges that she’s facing and that her students are facing, and she’s trying to do right by them,” Griggs explains of her character. “Sometimes she succeeds, and sometimes she doesn’t. And it’s been really amazing to be working with a character like that who is so complex and has this really big arc and journey.”

Given the play’s themes, Griggs felt drawn to her look inspired by Joan of Arc, a woman “who sort of challenged gender roles,” she says. “That felt very fitting for this play and for this moment in time.”

Attending opening night to cheer her on, Griggs has husband Sam French in the audience as well as some of her closest friends from college. “[It’s] very sweet because this play is so much about friendship and weathering big moments in your life when you’re a teenager,” Griggs said. “And these are those people for me — who I have this long history with and who have been through thick and thin [with me], and I think getting to experience this play with them, and get to celebrate this moment with them, is going to be really special.”

When Griggs learned that she would be originating her first Broadway role, it was the day after Donald Trumpwas elected President of the United States.

“It was a very complicated day,” she explained. “Then I got that call, and I was just like, ‘Whoa.’ There was this joy, and there was grief, and there was excitement, and there was fear. It was all the things that were very present for me on that day — and I think for a lot of us — and then working on this play was just also such a rich, emotional [experience] with so many different feelings.”

Griggs is also particularly thrilled to be working with the show’s star, Sink, who is best known for playing Max Mayfield in Netflix’s Stranger Things.

“She has the mentality of like an elite athlete,” she said of Sink. “She’s very diligent and intelligent about the questions she asks. She’s really brave. I find her work in this to be really special. And I hope that she’s as proud of herself as we all are of her because I think she’s really putting herself out there and doing really risky, emotional work.”

As to whether Griggs herself was nervous for her big opening night on Broadway, she said, “I would say I am 80% excited, 20% nervous. I don’t know how anybody can’t be a little bit nervous, but I feel very confident in the work that we’ve done, and I feel like whenever I feel any sort of spooky feelings, I can really lean on my cast. They are just so amazing, and I’m not afraid when I’m next to them.”

PHOTO CREDITS:

Photography: Alexandra Arnold
Hair: Seiji
Makeup: Kirin Bhatty
Styling: Andrew Gelwicks