A Bermudian actor living in the United States will headline a Broadway musical for the first time while holding his own alongside theatre veterans.

Nicholas Christopher stars with Lea Michele and Aaron Tveit in the Broadway revival of Chess, which hit the stage in November.

Mr Christopher, the son of Hamilton town crier Ed Christopher, who grew up in Boston, attributed the roots of the character to his feelings of homesickness and his family’s history of acting.

He added: “It’s the reason why I do what I do — everything that I am is because of Bermuda.”

Set during the height of the Cold War, Chess tells the story of an American and a Russian chess grandmaster who fight for the hand of a woman during an international tournament.

Mr Christopher plays the stoic and tortured Anatoly Sergievsky, who falls for Florence Vassy, the second to Anatoly’s American opponent.

Florence is played by Lea Michele, who has been nominated for several Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards and is best known for her roles as Rachel Berry in the TV musical series Glee and Fanny Brice in the play Funny Girl.

The pair appear alongside Aaron Tveit, a Tony Award-winning actor and singer who plays Freddie Trumper, the US chess champion and Anatoly’s opponent.

Mr Christopher said that much of the drama came from the political machinations that haunt the “star-crossed lovers”.

He added that while he initially found it challenging to get into the mindset of Anatoly, he eventually connected his character to a “sort of yearning” in his own life.

Mr Christopher said: “I didn’t know anything about being a chess master, and I didn’t know the first thing about Russia outside of drinking vodka.

“I landed on my feelings of being a Bermudian living in the US and trying to love a country I had no connection to.

“That sort of yearning for home is what I connected to.”

In an interview with the theatre magazine Playbill, Mr Christopher said that his brother and mother moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when he was seven years old.

He admitted that the first few years were difficult to adjust to because of the racist bullying he faced — a feeling that he later drew from while on stage.

Acknowledging this, Mr Christopher told The Royal Gazette that he imagined Anatoly had a similar feeling of wanting to be heard for who he was.

He added: “Anatoly is told throughout his whole life when to eat, when to sleep, when to play chess and even who he’s going to marry and what his family’s going to look like.”

As an actor performing in New York City for 15 years, Mr Christopher is no stranger to the Broadway stage.

He is best known for his role as Adolfo Pirelli in the 2023 Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and, eventually, the titular character himself.

He also played Aaron Burr and George Washington in some iterations of the acclaimed musical Hamilton; Norman Whitfield and Smokey Robinson in Motown the Musical; and John Thomas in the modern opera Miss Saigon.

Mr Christopher said that acting ran in his family, with his older brother, Jonathan, and his father both being actors.

He said that he took up acting when he was about 10, to feel closer to his father then as an emotional outlet.

Mr Christopher added that reactions to the show had been “great”.

He said: “My family keeps coming back to the show.

“They’re big theatre people and they know their stuff, so the fact that they keep coming back is a good sign.”

He added: “The musicality of this show is really, really amazing. It’s like pop songs written for a play.

“We found out that there were some people who bought tickets to see Chess during the intermission of another play that they were in the middle of.”

Ed Christopher confirmed his son’s input, saying that plenty of Bermudians had seen and enjoyed Chess.

The town crier described his son’s approach to the character of Anatoly as a “journey” that he gave “all or nothing” to.

He added that he and his wife were “very proud” of their children, saying: “They deliver nothing short of greatness.”