Jamie Lloyd had tried once before to lure Nicole Scherzinger to the stage. Several years ago, the renegade British theater director pursued the former Pussycat Dolls frontwoman to star in “Evita,” but the collaboration didn’t work out for scheduling reasons. “I had committed to something else,” she says. Still, Scherzinger was fascinated with the way the enfant terrible’s brain worked and his ability to attract a new generation of theatergoers to London’s once-stodgy West End. So when Lloyd came calling again and asked for a meeting in London, she quickly agreed. Then came his offer: playing Norma Desmond in a revival of “Sunset Boulevard.”
Scherzinger’s only familiarity with the material was Billy Wilder’s 1950 film, which starred Gloria Swanson as a faded beauty of the silent era hell-bent on a return to relevance.
Sami Drasin for Variety Magazine
“I was taken aback. I was like, ‘Wow. This is what you got me out here for. This is your big idea,’” Scherzinger recalls. “I was thinking, ‘I’m still Queen Pussycat Doll, and you’re already making me an old has-been movie star. That’s the role that you see for me?’ He said, ‘Please, just read the script.’”
And so she did. As she flipped through the pages, she began to see in Norma a version of herself. Scherzinger had been a chart-topper in the aughts, but hadn’t achieved solo success, and her all-girl act yielded to the Katys, Rihannas and Gagas of the next decade.
“I definitely had my time in the limelight like her, and the industry moves on without you,” she explains. “On a personal level, I really related to Norma’s struggle with loneliness and abandonment and feeling misunderstood and unseen — feeling very small and pathetic, even.”
On a warm, breezy day, Scherzinger is sitting in a sun-drenched office in her home in Portugal, a notepad filled with chicken-scratched ideas never far from reach. It’s the same room where she did many of her initial Zoom calls with Lloyd as they fleshed out their vision for the homicidal heroine.
“I would always say, ‘Jamie, I need people to fall in love with Norma. If they don’t fall in love with her, she’s doomed from the beginning,’” she remembers.
It’s hard to square the idea of an “unseen” woman with the figure before me. Even dressed down in a minimalist white button-down blouse, vintage Levi’s and pearl earrings, Scherzinger exudes the kind of glamour visible from outer space. It would also be impossible to ignore the economic bang “Sunset Blvd.” made after opening in London’s West End in September 2023, before its triumphant Broadway run at the St. James Theatre the following year. The revival also became a Broadway cash cow, culminating with a $2.48 million haul in its final week in July. The final show alone brought in $514,515, marking the highest-grossing single performance ever at the St. James.
Rosie O’Donnell, a lifelong Broadway fanatic who in her days hosting a talk show was considered among theater’s biggest boosters, was not familiar with the Pussycat Dolls when she arrived at the St. James while “Sunset Blvd.” was in previews.
“I was in shock and thought, ‘How is it that I don’t know this woman, who’s as beautiful as any human you’ve ever seen, moves with the grace of Gwen Verdon and sings like the best Broadway stars we’ve ever known?’” O’Donnell says. “I could not believe it. I went backstage, and I started crying. It was like finding Streisand, all of a sudden, at the height of Streisand’s career.”
When she won this year’s Tony Award for best actress in a musical — only the fifth time a woman has pulled off the feat for a Broadway debut, the most recent being Catherine Zeta-Jones for “A Little Night Music” in 2010 — there was no mistaking that Scherzinger was very much seen. Now, at 47, she is finally ready for her close-up.
Nothing has ever come easy for Scherzinger. She was born in Honolulu to an unwed and impoverished teen mother, who herself was one of 10 children. Mother and daughter left for the mainland with Scherzinger’s maternal grandparents — Tutu and Papa, she calls them — and headed to Kentucky, where, as a toddler of Hawaiian, Filipino and Ukrainian descent, Scherzinger didn’t look like the other kids. Mom worked multiple jobs while Papa, a Marine, and Tutu helped raise the little girl, instilling a deep faith in her that remains a bedrock to this day.
“My papa started out as an atheist, and then he would go on to be a priest and then a bishop, and now he’s an archbishop for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” says Scherzinger, a gold Orthodox crucifix peeking from behind her open collar. “My tutu’s mother had 22 pregnancies — four miscarriages and 18 children — living in a little three-bedroom house and having no money but a strong faith. That’s the blood that I am.”
Even her distinctive German last name — courtesy of her mother’s new husband, Gary Scherzinger — stood out. (Gary adopted her when she was 5 and is the man she calls her father to this day.) But her mom, who encouraged her to study musical theater at Ohio’s Wright State University, was her inspiration.
“My mother is my everything,” she says. “She sacrificed everything for me, and she worked very, very, very hard and is a very selfless woman, as all the women are in my family. They’re just silent warriors.”
Mom also pushed for Scherzinger to audition for a new reality series on The WB called “Popstars USA.” Season 1, which aired in 2001, featured Scherzinger as a member of the newly minted Eden’s Crush. It was the height of the girl group gold rush, following the success of Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls. Eden Crush’s first single, “Get Over Yourself,” hit the Top 10, and they toured with ’N Sync. Then, like a lost plotline from “Girls5eva,” their label crashed into bankruptcy and the women went their separate ways. In Scherzinger’s case, that meant joining a new group, the Pussycat Dolls, as lead singer. (The Dolls had been an established burlesque troop since the 1990s but pivoted to music in 2003.) Despite just two LPs over seven years, the group sold more than 10 million albums thanks to catchy hits like “Don’t Cha” and the “Slumdog Millionaire” tie-in “Jai Ho! (You Are My Destiny).”
Songwriter Diane Warren, who first collaborated with Scherzinger during her Pussycat Dolls days, says she stands alongside the great divas.
“I love that the world is seeing what I saw from the beginning, because she is a fucking great singer, but oh, my God, a fucking great actress too,” Warren says. “She has the ability to hit the notes, but that’s not always what makes someone great. They also have to make you feel what they’re singing while they’re hitting the notes. And she does that, and that’s a rare quality.”
Even at the height of Scherzinger’s pop-star success, Warren glimpsed shades of Norma when the pair worked together on “Until U Love U” from the 2008 album “Doll Domination,” a song about the struggle for self-acceptance.
“I look over, and she’s crying,” Warren says. “I go, ‘Nicole, why are you crying?’ She goes, ‘I don’t think I’m beautiful.’ I go, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ That was such a moment. Here’s somebody who is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my entire life thinking that. That memory never left me.”
But the music industry can be particularly cruel to sexy women, their shelf life being brief. And by 2011, girl groups were passé. As Scherzinger’s achievements were met with a yawn, she would soon face rejection with two solo albums that failed to chart. Over the ensuing years, there were highs, like voicing the protagonist’s mother in Disney’s 2016 animated hit “Moana” and a West End starring role in “Cats.” But other work signaled journeyman status at best, like serving as a judge on “The Masked Singer.” Having experienced mega-success in her 20s, she never honed the necessary skills to handle failure.
“When you’re so young, you don’t realize it at the time, but that time of growth is taken from you. I wonder about that with Britney Spears. That time was stripped from her. Is there a part of you that is stunted, and you’re not able to grow?” Scherzinger asks softly. “She’s definitely found herself in very co-dependent, needy relationships, and I have as well. And feeling desperate. I’ve felt that way in relationships as well.”
The romance wreckage included a 2015 breakup with Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, after eight years together, and a 2018 split from Bulgarian tennis star Grigor Dimitrov, whom she dated for three years.
But the professional and personal heartbreak primed her for something far more profound. As she and Lloyd brainstormed Norma over Zoom, she began to feel something special coalescing.
“Now if people would like it, I had no idea,” she says with a laugh.
For many in the St. James audience on opening night, Scherzinger was nothing short of transcendent.
“I almost lost a kidney. I was like, what the holy fuck is happening on that stage right now? It was intense. It was just beautiful. It was one of those times where the character and the actor merged at exactly the right moment in time,” says acting coach Leigh Kilton-Smith, who has worked with Sam Rockwell and Casey Affleck as well as Scherzinger off and on since the actress was 19. “It was almost a religious experience. Not to get too hyperbolic about it, but it was.”
Lloyd’s direction, with its provocative use of camera close-ups on her face and crazy blood-soaked ending, made Scherzinger’s performance all the more mesmerizing.
Laverne Cox, who also was there opening night, felt that same presence of the divine as Scherzinger brought Andrew Lloyd Webber’s swelling “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye” to life. Cox returned to the St. James altar two more times, and is brought to tears as she recalls a particular moment that occurred during an April performance.
“I headed backstage to say hello to Nicole, and she’s in the corner with Glenn Close, and they’re huddled chatting for about 20 minutes,” she says. (Close was the original actress to tackle Norma on Broadway.) “And everyone is still, standing around, waiting. And it was such a beautiful moment seeing them together. It felt very intimate. Dame Glenn Close was sort of passing a torch.”
Scherzinger remembers that interaction vividly. “She said this was arguably one of the greatest roles ever written. And it really tests your mettle, as she knows. I was nervous, but then I mustered up the courage to ask her to sign my album. And guess what she wrote on it?” she says, pausing for effect. “‘To my soulmate. Love, Glenn.’” The self-described people-pleaser is beaming as she draws on the memory. “I couldn’t believe it. Like, how cool is that?”
Still, Broadway can be unwelcoming. And Scherzinger’s outspoken faith makes her something of an outlier in an industry that balks at too much Jesus talk, especially when that talk becomes entwined with Trump messaging. She learned that when she commented on a Russell Brand Instagram post the day after the 2024 election in which the actor dons a red hat with the slogan “Make Jesus First Again.” Scherzinger replied, “Where do I get this hat?!” with prayer hands and red heart emojis. She deleted the comment and apologized for the unintended Trump association, noting: “Many of the marginalized communities feeling hurt and concerned by the results of the presidential election are people I care about most. I stand with them, as I always have throughout my life and career. If you know me, you know that.” But she isn’t sorry for the Jesus endorsement and notes that she’s not alone in her devotion.
“I have a wonderful church that I go to in Hollywood. Most of my friends in Hollywood are Christians. I think Christianity does get a bad rap, but I think that’s why, if you’re a true Christian, you have to lead by example and be the light,” she says.
More than 400 “Sunset Blvd.” performances later, the Nicole Scherzinger resurrection is complete. The moment arrived around the same time a small wave of actresses long defined — and dismissed — as sex symbols earned raves for once-in-a-career roles: Demi Moore in “The Substance” and Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl.” For Scherzinger, the film offers are now rolling in: The CAA-repped actress is first tackling the Rebel Wilson-directed musical comedy “Girl Group” in London, followed by an indie movie that will shoot in New York. She also recently returned to the studio with Warren to record new material that Warren predicts “is gonna be epic.”
On the nesting front, she’s building a home in Hawaii that she will share with her fiancé, former Scottish rugby star Thom Evans, close to where her mother, father, Tutu and Papa all live. She and Evans met in 2019 and became engaged in 2023, a year before her Broadway debut. If there’s any downtime, the couple will curl up and watch Netflix’s “Love on the Spectrum,” her favorite show. Her new life is the culmination of a metamorphosis that has been both soul-crushing and cathartic.
“You’re forced to shed old skins and say, ‘I can’t make an excuse anymore. I can’t be a victim anymore. I can’t be afraid anymore,’” she says. “It’s just liberating to take those chains off.”
Charity Spotlight: Special Olympics
Over her 15 years of work with the Special Olympics, Nicole Scherzinger has formed a close relationship with disability rights activist and film producer Timothy Shriver. The actress got involved with the organization to advocate for people like her 46-year-old aunt with Down syndrome. Shriver framed her aunt’s condition in a way that made sense to Scherzinger.
“Tim wouldn’t call it ‘disability.’ He would call it ‘super abilities,’” she says. “People who are special needs are superheroes because they don’t have the cynicism that we have. They see the world in a different, more beautiful way that hopefully would rub off on us to be able to see the world with more hope.”
The Special Olympics was founded in 1968 by Shriver’s mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, with the mission of transforming the lives of the millions of people with intellectual disabilities “both on and off the playing field.” In 2013, Scherzinger was named an ambassador. In that role, she has held court at the White House with President Obama and performed the national anthem at the A Capitol Fourth concert in 2015. She also hit those same iconic notes at the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics World Summer Games in Los Angeles that same year and co-wrote and performed the song “Victorious” with close friend Jonas Myrin for the closing ceremony of the 2019 Summer Games in Abu Dhabi.
The organization enjoys support from the likes of Chris Pratt, Charles Melton and Shriver’s sister, Maria. But Scherzinger would like to see so much more. “Hollywood is all about inclusivity. So my pitch would be ‘You’re fucking missing out if you’re not on this train,’” Scherzinger says. “They help us get back to the simplicity, the honesty. The world would be a better place if we just spoke like this to one another — just direct and in a loving way.”
Styling: Michael Philouze; Hair: Dimitris Giannetos/Opus Beauty; Makeup: Rokael/OPUS Beauty/Rokael Beauty; Fashion Credits: Dress: Vintage Gucci/Paume Los Angeles; Shoes: Christian Louboutin; Jewelry: Marli New York
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