Meet Solea Pfeiffer, the Star Taking Over Broadway as Penny Lane in Almost Famous

Glamour: How did you get into acting?

Solea Pfeiffer: I think all of this has really sprung from my first love: singing. I started playing violin when I was four and that led to a loving and understanding of music, which led to going to theater camps. I was lucky enough to go to a high school with a fantastic theater program, and then I studied musical theater and acting in college. It kept being the thing that I wanted to do and the doors kept opening. There has never really been a plan B. I've always been performing in one aspect or another; it was always something I was going to do.

A Jazzman's Blues was your feature film debut. How does filming a movie differ from being onstage for you?

There's a double-edged sword when it comes to theater. Every night there's room for improvement. Every night there's room to play and grow and change and become something else. When it comes to film and TV, that's forever, which is terrifying. At the same time, you come in ready to deliver, and hopefully, it goes how you hope, and then it's out of your control. There are aspects of total artistic surrender in both worlds that are completely different. I hope I get to do both forever.

How did you find out you got the part?

Tyler Perry initially called me to let me know he liked my audition. I was doing a chemistry read with Don Cheadle actually. [Laughs.] I had missed a call and my agent was like, “Tyler Perry is trying to contact you.” I called him back, and at that moment I was like, If this is what I got from this, hell yeah. That is a great day in my book to have contact with these people. A few days later I found out I got the part, which was crazy. 

What were you feeling at that moment?

Like I was going to, I don't know, faint, cry, throw up. I hadn't actually worked in a substantial capacity at that point, in like a year and a half because of the pandemic. So I went from no work really to a lead in a movie with Tyler Perry. I was scared to my core. I went and got Korean barbecue where I was living at the time and spent the entire dinner thinking, Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. What the hell? It felt amazing.

Your mom is Black and your dad is white. So much of A Jazzman’s Blues focuses on racism and colorism. Have you experienced either in your life?

I have definitely been very blessed to grow up in progressive areas. We left Cleveland when I was nine, and during the years of my life when I understood what was happening in the world, we were in Seattle. As a kid, I don't think I realized how racialized my growing up was until later. Then you start to realize, Oh yes, there was a certain way that boys treated me that they didn't treat my friends. The privilege that the way that I look and present has afforded me is not lost on me. But there was a certain sense of not totally fitting in anywhere. I didn't really have that many other mixed friends. I felt like a little bit of an island throughout my childhood. When I walked into the first day of rehearsal at Hamilton when I was like 22, I was really blown away by the fact that I had never been in a room with so many other people who looked like me before.