Ambudkar has been onstage since a wrist injury in high school derailed him from playing basketball. He grew up outside Baltimore, where his biochemist parents settled after emigrating from India in the 1980s. After struggles with alcohol addiction, he has finally made it to Broadway
LOS ANGELES — In 2004, Utkarsh Ambudkar completed the acting program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts feeling disillusioned. He’d spent his days in class but his nights at clubs in the East Village, freestyling and battle rapping — in his mind, he was much more of a rapper than an actor. A life chasing down parts in an industry where talent mattered less than “the amount of roles for people that look like you” seemed grim, he said recently, over a gargantuan bowl of chili at a restaurant near his Los Angeles home.
Fortuitously, he was soon introduced to Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv-rap troupe started by Lin-Manuel Miranda with Thomas Kail and Anthony Veneziale.
“Pups from the same litter,” Ambudkar, 35, said of the group, which presented him with an almost too-good-to-be-true opportunity: “I get to rap as good as I can rap? I don’t have to dumb it down? And I get to be as funny as I am? And I don’t have to dumb that down? Or tough that up?”
Since 2005, Ambudkar has been a part of the FLS performing lineup, which has appeared at Joe’s Pub, TEDxBroadway and on the Pivot TV network, among many other places; he has a tattoo of the FLS logo on his ribs. And when the group’s key players began working on other projects, including “Hamilton,” Ambudkar was involved: He played Aaron Burr in an early workshop and some readings.
But during that early-to-mid 2010s stretch, Ambudkar was struggling with alcohol addiction, which made him too erratic and unreliable for the quickly moving train that turned into the biggest Broadway breakout of this decade, cementing rap’s place on theater’s most prestigious stage.
“What we didn’t know as friends was that he was struggling in the way he was,” Kail said. “The stakes were high, and I didn’t know why he wasn’t responding.”
©2019 New York Times News Service