Kevin Chamberlin Has Tackled Stage & Screen, TikTok (and Marvel) is Next
Kevin Chamberlin is one of those actors who just makes any musical, TV show, or movie better. He’s a reliably funny, warm presence who always brings real humanity and groundedness to all sorts of outlandish characters and worlds. A generation grew up with him as butler Bertram on the 2011-2015 Disney Channel hit “Jessie,” while others, like me, first heard his voice on cast albums and in Broadway shows. He originated the roles of Horton in “Seussical” and Uncle Fester in “The Addams Family” – characters that have since been played by thousands of high schoolers and community theater performers – and has eight other Broadway credits to his name (“Chicago,” “Disaster,” “Wicked”) since his debut in 1992’s “My Favorite Year.” He recently co-starred in Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation of “The Prom” and was seen in the smash hit “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical,” performing a song he also wrote.
He’s tackled Broadway, movies, and TV…so what’s next for Kevin Chamberlin? The answer is TikTok. Over quarantine, Chamberlin posted his first video to the popular social media app and has since amassed over six million followers. In June, Chamberlin posted his most ambitious TikTok to date, an original song and music video called “I Wanna Be in a Marvel Movie.” This spin on a classic Broadway I Want song – which Chamberlin wrote with his TikTok partner Sam Kite (an “L.A. based writer/producer/director and content strategist,” according to his Instagram bio) – features Chamberlin fantasizing about filling the character actor roles in the big-budget superhero films.
To learn more, I spoke to Chamberlin and Kite over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WHY DID YOU START POSTING ON TIKTOK?
Kevin Chamberlin
Kevin Chamberlin [KC]: I’m a creature of the stage. During the lockdown, I was looking for ways to perform. My friend Sam [Kite] is in the digital advertising world and does a lot of work with TikTok, so I was very aware of it. When Biden/Harris won, I decided to make my first TikTok using the theme song to a Disney Channel show that I was on called “Jessie.”
Sam Kite [SK]: It got over 20 million views in a couple of days. We figured TikTok is the platform for us. So, we just started making content. We turned TikTok into Kevin’s digital cabaret. Instead of having a one-man show in some bar in New York, we just did those vignettes and songs as TikTok videos. They took off and we started getting into the groove. We engaged with “Ratatouille.” That became an overnight sensation. Kevin, being one of the first actual Broadway stars to submit a song for “Ratatouille,” I think really helped legitimize the entire movement. Then “Ratatouille” becoming this whole thing and him getting cast in it all from TikTok was the icing on the cake.
HAVE YOU ALWAYS WRITTEN SONGS?
KC: I’ve been a closet musical theater composer my whole life. I have written three-quarters of many musicals. I’ve written a lot of stuff for people’s cabaret acts and my cabaret act. I’m a really proficient lyricist. That’s where my joy in writing lies. There’s an old saying, “talent borrows, genius steals.” I love to write in specific genres, taking little tidbits from musicals that I love. There was a very, very funny story a couple of years ago where there was a death hoax, and fans from “Jessie” thought I had passed away. We wrote a song to address the death hoax. It was really coming out of my passion for musical theater.
SK: We also collaborated with New Jersey musical theatre college students who had created their own audience called Songs for a New Gay. We collaborated with them to do “The Gays Who Do Brunch,” a parody of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” all about coming out of quarantine and being able to go back to brunch again.
HOW DID THE “MARVEL” SONG COME ABOUT?
KC: I wanted to write a classic I Want song. Sam loves Marvel movies. He grew up reading the comic books and [watching] the movies. I’m more of an amateur fan. There are a lot of character actor prototypes in these Marvel films.
SK: What better than for a character actor to be in a Marvel movie as those great glorified characters that spice up the movies so well. We sat down and, in 45 minutes, Kevin had the full song written. I just made some tweaks to make it more Marvel-centric. We knew what we wanted to do costume-wise, so we worked the lyrics to fit those costumes and transitions from Thor’s world to the X-Men’s world to the guy cleaning up Tony Stark’s office.
KC: It showed you how much I knew about the difference between Marvel and DC. I said, “Oh, I’ll write a line about the cranky editor for Lois and Clark,” and Sam said, “no, that’s DC.” We threw it in there as a funny little joke. It was a wonderful collaborative process. We also got a wonderful orchestrator named Brian Lasky to orchestrate it.
SK: We asked him to include the Captain Marvel theme and the Avengers themes to give subtle references in the orchestration to those films.
KC: [It took about] six weeks, all together with post-production. We shot it in about five hours on a green screen in the valley. It was a lot of pre-planning. Things were more difficult during lockdown. We did a lot of Amazon shopping for costumes and t-shirts. Sam is a stickler for details. In the opening scene, I am wearing socks with little Captain America shields on them.
SK: We quickly ordered those socks the day before and they were delivered to the studio. We waited to do that scene last, ‘cause we had to wait for those socks to arrive.
WHAT HAS THE REACTION BEEN LIKE?
KC: It’s been crazy. The reaction from the Marvel community. We’ve gotten comments from people who work at Marvel…
SK: …marketing people at Disney gave us really wonderful, amazing praise and kudos. We’ve yet to have a call from [Marvel president] Kevin Feige, but we’re still waiting.
ON TIKTOK, YOU OFTEN INTERACT WITH FANS FROM BROADWAY AND “JESSIE.” WHAT HAS THAT BEEN LIKE?
KC: When you do a show, you have the stage door to interact with fans. As a Broadway community, I think we were all missing that connection. I saw that there were about 20 girls that posted the Gertrude side of “Notice Me Horton” looking for a Horton to duet with.
SK: We went through every single “Notice Me Horton” on TikTok and picked not only our favorite one, but we always try to pick the person who most exemplifies the character and maybe somebody who doesn’t live in New York with access to musical theater classes. It’s just some girl in Ohio singing in her bedroom. Those are the special moments.
KC: I got messages from so many people doing “Addams Family” whose productions were canceled. It was really lovely to reach out to them through Cameo, TikTok, and video messages. Some of them were still rehearsing on Zoom or actually did the show on Zoom during the pandemic. It was very touching that musical theater stayed alive. I’ve yet to see an amateur production of “The Addams Family.” I have a couple of nieces and nephews that are in a production. I can’t wait.
DO YOU HAVE ANY NEW VIDEOS COMING UP WE SHOULD LOOK FOR?
KC: We got a lot of TikToks coming. A couple of really fun collaborations with some big TikTok stars.
Sam Kite
SK: We have a song we are writing right now. We’re also filming a collaboration with a really big dancing TikTok star and we’re gonna do a cool musical theater dance number.
KC: She’ll be dancing. I’ll be holding their hand.
SK: I can’t name names, but we were huge fans of this TikToker. She’s really talented and she hit up Kevin and was like, “Hey, we should collaborate.” It turns out she was in the ensemble of “Wicked” when he was The Wizard, but she was leaving as he was coming in. We have already that musical theater connection, so I’m really excited for that one.
I JUST SPOKE TO THE CREATIVE TEAM OF “RATATOUILLE” AND WE TALKED ABOUT HOW TIKTOK SEEMS TO BE DEMOCRATIZING THE THEATER INDUSTURY AND GIVING MORE PEOPLE A VOICE. DO YOU FIND THAT TO BE TRUE?
KC: Any way we can take the big money out of the theater and bring it back to the artist is always the best answer. I love that costumers can show their stuff online, choreographers can show their choreography. The Shoebox Musicals guy on TikTok designs full stages with turntables and lighting. It’s incredible. It takes the power away from the big money. We got bogged down for a while with workshops upon workshops. I did “The Addams Family” back in 2010 and we had two and a half years of workshops. I think about how much money we could have saved if we could have done our original readings online. We could have had choreographers present their work in a video and shared it with the cast. This was a pretty horrible year, but some wonderful things came out of it. It was beautiful how art pushed through even during this pandemic.
You can follow Kevin Chamberlin’s TikTok at chamberlin_kevin. He can also be found on Instagram and Cameo.