Josh Gad has cojones — or maybe, since his character Olaf from “Frozen” has become a Disney icon, the word should be a more family-friendly “gumption.”
Consider that after a lifetime of acting lessons, four years of drama school at Carnegie Mellon and three years after college of booking just one professional gig (a single episode of “ER”), the quirky actor took what felt like his retirement. big. .
In 2005, Gad was offered the stage role of Barfée in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but since it was in San Francisco, Gad said no. He wanted Broadway.
“Aim higher,” Gad writes he told himself in “In Gad We Trust: A Tell-Some” (Gallery Books, out Tuesday).
Gad grew up in Florida, the son of a typical Jewish mother and an atypical emerald merchant father. Gad’s comedy career began when his parents separated, leaving his mother depressed. Gad first fell in love with comedy at age 4 when his Holocaust survivor grandparents took him to see a Borscht Generation comedian in the Catskills, helping Gad realize his mother needed for humor.
“If there was one way to break my mother out of her daze, damn it, it would be laughter,” he writes.
Gad repeated jokes to his mother, made voices and faces, ran around in his underwear pulled up to his nipples like a child. Her laughter became a drug for young Gad, cementing a career path from which he would never look back.
“Now I was trying to make everyone around me laugh at all times.”
Gad’s mother signed him up for children’s theater at the Hollywood Playhouse. By his senior year in high school, Gadi was performing in stage productions and winning national speaking competitions.
He was class president with a beautiful girlfriend and a cool car, but his acting success was far from preordained.
Gad was rejected from his first two college choices (Juilliard and Northwestern), which sent him into a downward spiral of self-doubt and depression. If Gad had always believed in himself, he also regularly fell into funks.
It wasn’t until a doctor told him he had “anxiety” that Gad was able to “right his ship” with medication, making him a lifelong advocate for being open about mental health issues.
“Know this,” he writes, “there is nothing wrong with you if you suffer from these very real and very crippling disorders.”
Gad’s “safety school” was the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, where he trod the floorboards with future stars Josh Groban, Matt Bomer and Leslie Odom, Jr.
Then it was off to Hollywood and a slow but steady road to stardom. Later in 2005, when The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee made its way to Broadway, Gad returned to the cast.
Next up was a starring role in The Book of Mormon, the script of which Jake Gyllenhaal initially thought was hilarious, but also highly controversial for Gad. Gad’s agent fully agreed, saying, “There is no…. how on Earth can you do that.”
Gad, of course, trusted his instincts and took the role to become a star. He rubbed shoulders with icons from Oprah to Bono, Springsteen to Streep, while his childhood hero Robin Williams watched the performance and called Gad “a genius.”
That stage success led to television and film roles for the actor, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. He moved on to “Modern Family” and lost roles to Bill Hader for “Punk’d” and Jack Black for “Tropic Thunder,” but he also did “Pixels” with Adam Sandler and became a guest correspondent for “The Daily Show.” of Jon Stewart. .
Kevin Spacey “took an interest” in her while filming 21, though Gad says it wasn’t “that kind of interest.” The two would have lunch together and have “little impressions,” competing to see who could do the best impersonations of Hollywood legends from Jack Lemmon to Jack Nicholson.
Then there was Olaf in Frozen.
Gad had always dreamed of a role in a Disney animated film ever since he saw Robin Williams play the Genie in Aladdin.
“I want to do this one day,” he told his mother after watching the film.
But like everything else in Gad’s career, Disney success didn’t come easily. After high school, he had applied for a job at Disney World in Orlando, but was told nothing was available. Perhaps they would call him again in the future, Gad was told, but the future never came.
“For the next 25 years apparently nothing was ever opened,” he writes.
But when he read about the role in “Frozen,” Gad knew. “I don’t think I’ve ever touched a character as quickly as I did Olaf.” And with that, Gadi had finally become a Disney icon.
Today Gadi is a star of stage and screen, as well as a happy husband and father. Even through a lifetime of anxiety and self-doubt, Gad never stopped believing in himself. As he writes in his book, “dreams really do come true when you work hard enough and never give up.”
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