The key to Andrew Burnap’s success seems to be low expectations. He didn’t even shower when he auditioned for his role as the love interest in Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White because he assumed he wouldn’t be cast.

“It actually wasn’t daunting at all,” he exclusively tells Parade of the audition process while sitting in our New York studio, “because I thought, ‘There is not a chance I’m going to get this.’

“I woke up, I was doing Under the Banner of Heaven in Canada,” he remembers. “I got this audition notice, and I was like, ‘This is a lottery ticket. Absolutely not.’ I think I did two takes. I rolled out of bed, I didn’t even shower. I had bed head. I’m just doing this basically so that my agents can say, ‘He did the tape.’ I sent it off and a couple weeks later, I got an email from my manager saying, ‘Hey, you have a callback with Marc [Webb, the film’s director.] I was like, ‘You’re joking.'”

After several more rounds of auditions for the part of Jonathan, a bandit and Snow White’s true love (replacing the Prince in the original), Burnap learned he landed the pivotal role while playing a round of Frisbee golf with his brother. (“I know it’s lame, but I love it,” he laughs.)

“I sat on the ground because I just never thought it would happen,” he says. “You train yourself as an actor when you do a big audition to just forget about it. Because the minute you really want it, it could crush you when you don’t get it.”

As luck, and a large helping of talent would dictate, however, Burnap’s low expectations have been surpassed quite a lot lately. In addition to starring alongside Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot in one of Disney’s most expensive films ever made, he’s currently also starring in a Broadway staging of Othello along with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal. He helmed the A24 horror film, The Front Room, last year with Brandy, starred opposite Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway in WeCrashed and played King Arthur in the 2023 Broadway revival of Camelot.

andrew-burnap-and-rachel-zegler-in-snow-white

Oh, and he’s also got a Tony Award, which he earned for playing Toby Darling in the two-part Broadway sensation The Inheritance, another role he thought he had no chance of landing. When the play’s writer, Matthew López, initially approached Burnap to play Toby in a workshop of the epic, it was very much as a placeholder.

“Maybe two or three nights before, Matthew called me, and he said, ‘Hey, we can’t find an actor we want to play Toby Darling. Will you just read the part for the week?'” Burnap remembers. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, yes,’ and he said, ‘Ultimately you will never play the part in a production, but it would be great to see what you did with it.’

“In that phone call, he gave me permission to do whatever I wanted because there was no pressure to be good or to prove that I could do this part,” Burnap says, again capitalizing on his own low expectations to feel unburdened when it came time to perform.

While Burnap has been stockpiling acting credits since his Shakespeare in the Park debut in 2014, the double whammy of Snow White and Othello certainly signifies a leveling up in his career.

Growing up watching films like The Lion King, Burnap was nervous to enter the Disney machine after working in smaller-scale projects and theater. “I had gotten off a plane in the morning and couldn’t sleep a wink,” he says of his arrival to set.

“You have to be very much in charge of yourself and maintain a certain amount of focus,” he says of working on a large-budget Disney project, “because if you don’t, there are so many moving parts that you could lose yourself in the shuffle of it.”

“Going on set that first day in the Queen’s dining room, I was amazed at the detail and the scale of it all,” he remembers. “Everyone is working so hard and with such care to make this the best thing that it could be that you rise to the occasion and bring that sense of drive and focus to your own work.”

Snow White is ultimately a love story, and so Burnap spent much of his time working closely with Zegler. He says they “had a great rapport from the start” and that it was “just a joy” to work with her.

The pair recreated the kiss from the 1937 original, perhaps one of the most iconic kisses in cinema history, but the final product looks a lot more glamorous than what the pair endured on set.

“All I can remember about those days was it was so hot in the studio,” Burnap says. “It was at Pinewood Studios [in England], and I don’t think that part had air conditioning, so we were all just sweating buckets, and makeup had to come and help every time.”

The pair have remained friends since, with Burnap supporting Zegler during her own Broadway Shakespeare staging last year when she starred in Romeo + Juliet, which he called “amazing” and “a really special experience.”

Burnap also got to break out his vocal chops for Snow White although he classifies himself as “an actor who can carry a tune” rather than a vocalist. “I definitely felt the pressure to have my voice be the best that it possibly can,” he says. “I can’t believe I’m singing these songs that people will show their kids, that some people might have at their weddings. It just kind of blew my mind.”

Andrew Burnap, Molly Osborne, Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Kimber Elayne Sprawl and cast during curtain call on opening night of Othello at the Barrymore Theatre on March 23 in New York City.

While Burnap enjoys singing (and is down to take on a Stephen Sondheim musical if anyone is interested), he’s more sure of his abilities in non-musical endeavors like Othello. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Burnap is very familiar with Shakespeare, but he credits his finesse of the Elizabethan language to none other than the newly minted Albus Dumbledore, John Lithgow.

“Shakespeare is very much meant to be seen, experienced and felt,” says Burnap, “because in a great actor’s hands, you might not intellectually understand what the person is saying, but you can viscerally understand the experience. My first real understanding of that was when I was in King Lear with John Lithgow, and I played Spear Carrier No. 8. The only work I can use is ’embody.’ He embodied everything he was saying, so if there was anything I was unclear about intellectually, I knew what it meant to him.”

In Othello, Burnap is living up to Lithgow’s example, embodying Cassio, a young captain caught up in Iago’s (Gyllenhaal) scheme to destroy Othello (Washington). While Burnap certainly shines in the role, it is a tad surprising for a recent Tony Award winner to take the fourth-billed role in a Broadway production.

“When I first was approached about this, I have to admit that my ego took over and was like, ‘Cassio’s not that big of a role,'” Burnap confesses. “But of course you would be really dumb not to be in the room with these giants and these geniuses.” In re-reading the play, he also felt there was something about the reputation-obsessed Cassio that would speak to a modern audience in the age of social media.

But really, how would one say “no” to working with two of the world’s greatest living actors day in and day out for months. As you might expect, Burnap, as with his arrival on the Snow White set, came into Othello rehearsals a bit intimidated.

“They have such stardust to them,” he says of his co-stars. “That first day it was just like, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe we’re all in the same room,’ but then immediately it just becomes about the work. There’s definitely the big differences like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe Denzel is looking at me,’ but then after that it wears off.”

In the weeks since rehearsal began, Burnap has struck up a friendship with the two icons. “Denzel and I like to share jokes with each other,” he says. “We once got yelled at by the creative team because we were a little too loud laughing.”

Meanwhile Burnap says that Gyllenhaal “feels like a big brother” to him and that the pair like to razz each other and play pranks. One topic of their brotherly jabs is that when Burnap won his Tony Award, he actually beat out Gyllenhaal, who was also nominated for her performance in Sea Wall/A Life. “We’ve joked about it quite a bit,” says Burnap laughing.