Gad's CMU degree has award-winning screen, stage roles
According to the head of the drama school at Carnegie Mellon University, Josh Gad “is a Tony or Academy Award winner simply waiting to happen.”
“Explosive, disruptive and mercurial, Josh defies description and thankfully the dreaded pigeonhole,” says CMU's Peter Cooke.
Gad earned a bachelor of fine arts in drama from CMU in 2003. Since then, the 36-year-old has received his share of awards, including the Annie Award for outstanding achievement in voice acting for his role as Olaf the Snowman in Disney's 2013 megahit, “Frozen” and a Grammy for best musical theater album for the original cast recording of “The Book of Mormon.” The irreverent musical also won the Tony Award for best musical and Gad was nominated for creating the part of Elder Cunningham.
He's starred as the president's son in the short-lived TV series “1600 Penn,” voiced a dog through several reincarnations in the recent “A Dog Purpose,” and co-starred opposite Kevin Hart in 2015's “The Wedding Ringer.” He'll next be lighting up the big screen as LeFou, the sidekick to the preening villain Gaston in “Beauty and the Beast.”
“For a lot of people, when they meet comedians, they come away very disappointed,” says Gad's good friend Rory O'Malley, who roomed with him in Shadyside and is playing King George III in the national tour of “Hamilton.” “But that's not what happens when you meet Josh. Josh is endlessly witty.”
Once reportedly described as “a class clown with a quick wit and a Zero Mostel zest for practical jokes,” Gad was affectionately called “an agent of anarchy within any class” by Ingrid Sonnichsen, his onetime Carnegie Mellon acting professor.
“He was dear, absolutely dear, but you wanted to housebreak him,” Sonnichsen told writer Nicholas Ducassi in a 2012 profile of the irrepressible Gad, who was not available for an interview.
“I've witnessed him making so many different types of people laugh,” O'Malley says. “To the point where sometimes I'd have to stop him and say, ‘OK, Josh, can we just go have dinner now?'”
For his next project, Gad will have to put the jokes aside. He plays a young lawyer who works with Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman), who would go on to become the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, defending a black man accused of rape and kidnapping. The film, “Marshall,” comes out in October.
Douglas J. Gladstone is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.
