Matt Mueller mostly slips under the radar when he strolls through his native Evanston — almost as if he’s draped in an invisibility cloak.
The actor who is playing the auburn-haired Ron Weasley in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” now playing at the James M. Nederlander Theatre, says he’s rarely recognized — even though he’s from one of the Chicago area’s best known “muggle” acting families.
His sister Jessie Mueller won a best actress Tony Award in 2014 for “Beautiful — The Carole King Musical,” and another sister, Abby, played Jane Seymour in “Six” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and on Broadway.
Mueller’s big Broadway break came in 2019, when he first landed the Weasley role. The pandemic hit about a year later and, well, you know how the rest of that story goes.
Needless to say, he’s delighted to be reprising the role in Chicago.
“From the get-go, my experience with this show — and the creatives in this show — has been really lovely, welcoming and exciting,” he said during a recent chat while staring out at a glistening Lake Michigan from Evanston’s Garden Park.
Alas, he didn’t arrive in the Weasley family’s Ford Anglia flying car. Nor does he actually have red hair (it’s a wig in the show), although his fake English accent fits him comfortably, like one of Ron’s rumpled, hand-me-down wizarding robes.
“It’s certainly not super-posh,” he said, slipping in and out of a mumbly Ron. “It’s a comfortable pocket — just like Ron. It’s a little corduroy.”
“Cursed Child” (it premiered in London in 2016) is the eighth story in the Potter series. Almost two decades after Harry, Ron and Hermione defeated Voldemort, their children are back at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The wicked fun starts when Harry’s headstrong kid, Albus, becomes buddies with the son of Dad’s fiercest rival, Draco Malfoy.
Back in 2019, the Broadway production was split in two parts — sometimes on separate days — with a total run time of about five hours.
The touring production, which launches in Chicago, is much shorter (a single, three-hour-long show) and to Mueller, it feels better.
“We’ve really got to the essence of the story. And it crackles. … The storytelling is just electric,” Mueller said.
Mueller has read all of the J.K. Rowling books. He’s seen some but not all of the movies.
“He’s not not brave,” Mueller said of Ron. “But he’s not the one who’s going to be jumping and saying, ‘Let’s go get into an adventure!’ But he will be there and he will have your back no matter what.”
In a way, Mueller has been preparing for the Ron role all of his life — beginning as a child when his parents would haul the Mueller kids (Matt, Jessie, Abby and Andrew) to shows in the family’s Dodge Caravan. His parents, the actors Roger Mueller and Jill Shellabarger, read bedtime stories nightly to the children, morphing from one fictional character into another.
“And then of course there’s Monty Python. They were all raised on Monty Python,” Shellabarger said.
There was also plenty of singing in the Mueller home — and a no-singing rule at the dinner table that was not strictly enforced.
“In a household like ours, often life is a song cue. You say something and it reminds somebody of a song. So off you go,” Shellabarger said.
Mueller went to Evanston Township High School, where, among other plays, he was in a production of the British farce “Charley’s Aunt.” After that, Mueller knew he wanted to be an actor.
There’s little professional jealousy among the Mueller kids, Matt Mueller insists. It’s great, he says, that they can “talk shop” and bounce ideas off each other.
“It’s always lovely for someone to say, ‘Oh you were so great— great show!’ But there is something very gratifying about really talking about what’s going on in a piece and what’s landing, what’s coming across — how things are actually working technically or story wise.”
It’s hard to put Mueller into an acting box. He said he’s drawn to characters that have “surprised” him. He’s done “Taming of the Shrew,” “Julius Caesar” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” all at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. His resume includes the British farce “The Play That Goes Wrong”, and he could be seen dashing on and off the stage in two different productions of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).”
Says his mother: “He’s just really funny and he finds delight in the ridiculous in life.”
When he’s not on stage, Mueller finds delight on a bicycle (he owns five of them). So even if you do recognize him in Evanston, he might not be in a good place to chat about the correct way to summon, say, the Patronus Charm.
Bicycling is “a mostly solitary endeavor for me, which is one of the reasons I love it,” he said.