Nicole Scherzinger arrives in the makeshift dressing room in a flurry of silk and nervous energy. She takes off her dark glasses: no makeup. “This is me in work mode,” she says.
But her skin is flawless, her eyes clear and piercing, eyebrows arched over high cheekbones, a toned stomach glimpsed under her loose, gold-patterned shirt. It is midsummer and she is getting ready to perform at Britain’s Henley Festival, an event that transforms a verdant bend in the river Thames into a hubbub of tents around a floating stage.
She’s the star attraction but admits she’s anxious. “I am always picky about sound,” she says. But she’s eager to discuss the subject at hand, which is her Broadway debut in an incendiary new version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. “I am 46, and I’ve dreamed of going to Broadway my whole life,” she says, smiling. We’ve moved to her trailer, sitting amid white leather cushions and sipping coconut water. “It has taken a long time, but it feels really special because I get to do it as Norma Desmond.”
Lloyd Webber’s musical is based on the 1950 Billy Wilder film about the fading silent-film star hiding away in a decaying mansion but clinging to her dream of a comeback. It’s been the vehicle for memorable performances by Patti LuPone and Glenn Close. But Scherzinger’s interpretation, which she debuted at London’s Savoy Theatre last year, offered something raw and revealing. A stripped-back monochrome production by British director Jamie Lloyd, full of smoke and shadows and incorporating cameras and screens to tell the story of Norma’s doomed love affair with a young screenwriter, the show drives home the sense that stars flicker in and out, losing their place in the pantheon.
It is a trajectory that Scherzinger, who first found fame leading the early-aughts girl group Pussycat Dolls, understands. “I know what it’s like to be dismissed,” she says. “I know what it’s like to be discarded. I connected with Norma in that way. What brought her to life was her imagination, her creativity, her dream. That is where she felt whole, in front of that camera.” She carries on with some force: “I connected to her feeling of loneliness. The industry is difficult like that. I have always struggled with loneliness. I have definitely struggled with abandonment. In this version, Norma is finally getting a chance to tell her story, and it’s an honest story—a human story of struggle. Who doesn’t want to be loved?”
In this way, the production turns a Grand Guignol drama about an actorly has-been into an epic tragedy. It becomes everybody’s story. “And the story of time,” Scherzinger adds. “Where does time go? Everybody will experience that, even those cute little TikTokers! It’s like, honey, you will blink, and you will say, ‘Where did that time go?’ ”
Scherzinger is funny and confiding, with a rich sense of irony. Her portrayal of Norma won her the Olivier for best actress in a musical—but the snobbish surprise that greeted her casting in London (some suggested she was too pop, too young, too lightweight) has clearly stayed with her. “I’ve had that my whole life,” she says ruefully. Lloyd, one of the UK’s most in-demand stage directors, laughs when he recalls the reaction. “For many people it was such a baffling proposition,” he says. “Me directing Nicole in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. I was taken aback by the cynicism and skepticism. It became part of the story of the production because people were so confused by it—and then came to see it. And it was not what they were expecting.”
Lloyd Webber, who has known Scherzinger for years, had no doubts. “I genuinely think she is exceptional,” he tells me. “There are only a handful of actors who really can act through the music and the words. So many singers sing wonderfully, but they don’t necessarily understand the language. I would put Nicole in the league of the very highest.”
Lloyd wanted to work with Scherzinger for a simple reason: “I love musicals to be sung impeccably,” he explains. “Nicole is clearly a world-class vocalist.” Working together, they have become the firmest of friends. (“He just understood me,” Scherzinger says.) He still teases her about their first encounter a few years ago, when they arranged to meet—coincidentally—at the Savoy. “She came down the stairs in a huge hat and sunglasses,” he remembers, laughing. “She had her manager and her assistant and a guy filming for social media, and I thought, Oh my goodness.”
Scherzinger’s rock star glamour can also be worn as an armor against the world. At the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, where she won best musical performance, she looked every inch a star, but also felt surprisingly vulnerable. “I was seated next to Elton John and Sir Ian McKellen,” she recalls. “I was like, What am I doing here? I mean, I love theater, but these aren’t my peers.” She laughs about it now. “I still feel the little Nicole in me come out.”
Little Nicole was born in Honolulu and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where nobody looked like her. “I was really, really shy,” she says. “I was of my own skin, a Hawaiian, Ukrainian, Filipino little girl. I had these long, lanky arms, and I felt awkward and didn’t have a lot of confidence.” Her sense of difference was exacerbated by the family’s lack of means. “We were super blessed, but I didn’t grow up with much money. My mom went to yard sales and consignment shops,” she says. “As I got older, I was like, ‘I’m going to buy stuff from the Gap.’ ” The family drove two hours to a Gap outlet, and still felt they were overpaying. “To this day,” she says, “I don’t take anything for granted.”
It was listening to Whitney Houston that first made her believe she might have a chance to be somebody. “I would put her music on and pretend I was her.” She demonstrates, sitting upright, spreading her arms and softly singing, “I believe the children are our future….”
By 14 she had started acting, and after attending a performing arts high school, she studied theater at Wright State University in Ohio. “I found my tribe,” she says of those years. She never, however, dreamed of playing Norma Desmond. “Because of my skin color, I’d had roles like Tuptim [the slave wife] in The King and I. And Kim in Miss Saigon.” Broadway actress Lea Salonga, who is Filipina, was her idol growing up. “But that’s the beauty of Jamie; it wasn’t about what Norma looked like or her skin color. ”
The way Scherzinger looked as a young woman did affect what happened as she got sucked sideways into music, touring with the late-’90s alt-rock band Days of the New, supporting the Foo Fighters and Bush. “It was quite an awakening,” she says with a smile. “To go from theater to these gigs with all these rowdy people who were standing up? I was like, People are not sitting down quietly and watching me? It was weird.”
When that came to an end, she was cast by a TV talent show in a band called Eden’s Crush before her fame went nuclear as the lead singer in the Pussycat Dolls, a group assembled by choreographer Robin Antin on the back of her burlesque troupe. It’s clear that the band’s hypersexualized image didn’t sit easily with her. “I just wasn’t comfortable wearing those clothes,” Scherzinger says. “I was a singer first, always. I think over time I was able to find my own style.” She credits the stylist Andrea Lieberman with helping her find clothing that made her “more comfortable, inspired by Gwen Stefani meets Will.i.am.”
By now we are in the middle of our second interview. Scherzinger has flown to New York to headline a Wimbledon viewing party in Brooklyn; she’s also just switched on the lights at the Empire State Building. She’s in elegant red, a “lovely little summer number” by Valentino.
In the past, she has talked openly about her struggles with bulimia and body dysmorphia, issues that were aggravated by a career so closely focused on her image. She’s described going to the gym for hours a day and obsessing over food. It was only when such habits began to adversely affect her vocal cords that she sought out treatment, and eventually put it behind her. “She is a vulnerable person,” says Lloyd. “It’s amazing how open and honest she is about that. When you get to know her, she is the funniest person I have ever met. Highly intelligent, hugely insightful.”
I ask Scherzinger whether she thinks things have gotten better for women trying to make it in the music industry. She pauses before she answers. “I think the initial idea of the Dolls was to be sexy for others, where I think for the women of today, their sex appeal is for themselves,” she says. “Real strength is loving yourself, embracing yourself.” I think back to her concert at Henley, as the night darkened over the river and a giant inflatable duck floated gently by in a particularly British incarnation of fun. Scherzinger looked absolutely at one with herself, sleek in sequins as she opened the night singing “Diamonds Are Forever” in her soaring, easy soprano. She raised huge cheers when she sang the Pussycat Dolls’ hits but bigger ones for “We Are the Champions,” celebrating England’s win in the Euros semifinal. The audience swayed along, thoroughly under her spell.
“Self-acceptance and love are always a work in progress,” Scherzinger tells me. “That’s the beauty of getting older. Life happens and things are put into perspective and you realize what’s most important.”
Her unusual empathy—a friend called it her superpower—and the vicissitudes of her own career made Scherzinger a remarkably warm and wise judge of younger artists on The X Factor, where she was the driving force in the decision that led to the formation of One Direction. How does she feel when she sees the success of stars such as Harry Styles? “I am so happy for them,” she says. “They had that shot and they made the most of it. What people sometimes forget is the hard work and the sacrifice.”
It’s a quality she brings to her own life. “The thing I am most inspired by is her work ethic,” says Lloyd. “She has this real desire to find the depths and the detail in everything. She keeps going until it’s perfect, and for her it’s never perfect.” Lloyd Webber says she’s an inspiring presence in a rehearsal room. “When she is committed to something, she will go through hell and high water,” he says. “She had quite a bad flu when Sunset opened in London, but you’d never have known it.”
As she gears up for Broadway, Scherzinger is looking for a place to live in New York. “It’s such a buzz,” she says. “I am going to see all the shows, plays, and musicals I can.” Her home base is still in Los Angeles, although she spends a lot of time in the UK with her fiancé, Thom Evans, a former international rugby player for Scotland whom she met on The X Factor: Celebrity in 2019, when she was on the judging panel and he was a member of the boy band Twen2y4Se7en. A gracious, gentle presence, he was with her at Henley, and she dedicated a song to him.
Wedding plans are on hold, for now: “Broadway is going to take up my time next year,” she says. Family—her mother, father, younger sister, and Thom’s family too—is clearly important to her. Before she settled in New York, she planned a trip to Hawaii—“where my roots are”—and to Tennessee to see her sister. “I love to have a beautiful meal, a glass of wine, good conversation, lots of laughter,” she says. “We like game nights where we play cards and board games.”
She’s nervous about Broadway, she admits. “I’ve got nerves, absolutely, because you want it to be great and you want people to absorb and receive all of it. But I think when I do get nervous, I just put my head down. Jamie is always saying I need to be brave. I say, ‘You’ve got me barefoot without makeup in the most uncomfortable positions! I’m being brave.’ And he’d say, ‘No, be braver.’ I am proud of that. That’s a testament to not to listen to anyone else’s judgments. Only you know who you are and what you are meant for. I know who I am.”
In this story: hair, Peter Gray using Oway; makeup, Kuma for Surratt Beauty; manicurist, Miki Higuchi using Dior Le Baume. Produced by AL Studio.