Pinkham, in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on March 8. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

When Bryce Pinkham landed the “bad guy” role of Carl in Ghost: The Musical, an adaptation of the 1990 film that began performances on Broadway in March, he relished interpreting his crooked banker character. “It’s pretty easy for me to understand living in New York and trying to get ahead of other people,” Pinkham quips. “That’s what actors do.”

Pinkham, who holds an MFA in acting (2008) from the Yale School of Drama, has appeared in such distinguished American plays as Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater in 2008) and Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle (at Hartford Stage in 2009 and New York City’s Signature Theatre in 2009–10). But a set of juggling pins on a shelf in his spartan dressing room at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and a framed photo of himself and a Yale classmate in red-nose garb, suggest an affection for clowning. In fact, a commedia dell’arte–style production of Molière’s The Flying Doctor at Boston College, directed by professor Luke Jorgensen, sparked not only his love for physical comedy (its “theory and practice” was the topic of his senior thesis) but also his decision to pursue acting as a profession.

Pinkham commenced the aspiring New York actor’s life in December 2008—waiting tables, tutoring, coaching youth soccer, and auditioning around these “survival jobs.” Within a few months he was cast in the parts of the restive Indian Black Fox and Henry Clay in the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public Theater. When the show moved to Broadway in 2010, so did he. Ghost is Pinkham’s second Broadway outing. His survival job now is teaching clown skills to acting students at New York University and The Studio/New York. With funding from a Leonore Annenberg fellowship, he’s hatching a solo show based on the memoir of 19th-century British clown Joseph Grimaldi. Time permitting, Pinkham also performs with Theater of War, a nonprofit troupe that presents readings of Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes; he has traveled with the company to military and civilian venues in the United States, Guantanamo Bay, and Okinawa.

“You know that saying performers like to use—’I did this because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else’?” he asks. “I’ve always felt that to be an actor you have to be able to do a lot of things well.”

Nicole Estvanik Taylor ’01 is managing editor of American Theatre magazine.