Josh Gad has cojones — or maybe, since his Olaf character from “Frozen” has become a Disney icon, the word should be a more family-friendly “gumption.”
Consider that after a lifetime of acting lessons, four years of drama school at Carnegie Mellon, and three years after college of booking only one professional gig (a single episode of “ER”), the wannabe actor passed on what seemed like his big break.
In 2005, Gad was offered the stage role of Barfée in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” but since it was running in San Francisco, Gad said no. He wanted Broadway.
“Aim higher,” Gad writes he told himself in “In Gad We Trust: A Tell-Some” (Gallery Books, out Tuesday).
Gad grew up in Florida, the son of a typical Jewish mother and atypical emerald dealer of a father. Gad’s comedic career began when his parents split, leaving his mother depressed. Gad first fell in love with humor at age 4, when his Holocaust-survivor grandparents took him to see a Borscht Belt comedian in the Catskills, helping Gad to understand that his mother required the salve of humor.
“If there was one way to break my mother from her stupor, dammit, it would be laughter,” he writes.
Gad would repeat jokes to his Mom, do voices and make faces, run around with his underwear pulled up to his nipples like a baby. Her laughter became like a drug to young Gad, cementing a career path from which he would never look back.
“I was now trying to make everyone around me laugh at all times.”
Gad’s mother signed him up for children’s theatre at the Hollywood Playhouse. By his senior year in high school, Gad was starring in stage productions and winning national oration competitions.
He was class president with a pretty girlfriend and a cool car, but his acting success was far from pre-ordained.
Gad wasn’t accepted at his two first choices for college (Juilliard and Northwestern), which led him on a downward spiral of self-doubt and depression. If Gad had always believed in himself, he also regularly fell into funks.
It wasn’t until a doctor told him he had “anxiety” that Gad was able to “right his ship” with medications, making him a lifelong advocate of being upfront with mental health issues.
“Know this,” he writes, “there is nothing wrong with you if you suffer from these very real and very crippling disorders.”
Gad’s “safety school” was the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, where he trod the floorboards with future stars Josh Groban, Matt Bomer, and Leslie Odom, Jr.
Then it was on to Hollywood and a slow but steady path to stardom. Later in 2005, when “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” made its way to Broadway, Gad wheedled his way back into the cast.
Next was a starring role in “The Book of Mormon,” whose script Jake Gyllenhaal initially thought was hilarious but also too controversial for Gad to do. Gad’s agent fully agreed, saying “There’s no …. way on Earth you can do this.”
Gad, of course, trusted his instincts and took the role, of becoming a star. He rubbed shoulders with icons from Oprah to Bono, Springsteen to Streep, while his childhood hero Robin Williams saw the performance and called Gad “a genius.”
That stage success led to TV and movie roles for the actor, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. He passed on “Modern Family” and lost roles to Bill Hader for “Punk’d” and Jack Black for “Tropic Thunder,” but he also did “Pixels” with Adam Sandler and became a guest correspondent for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.”
Kevin Spacey “took an interest” in him during the filming of the movie “21,” although Gad says it wasn’t “that kind of interest.” The two would dine together and have “impression offs,” competing to see who could do better imitations of Hollywood legends from Jack Lemmon to Jack Nicholson.
Then there was Olaf in “Frozen.”
Gad had always dreamt of a role in a Disney animated film, ever since watching Robin Williams playing Genie in “Aladdin.”
“I want to do that someday,” he told his mother after seeing the film.
But like everything else in Gad’s career, Disney’s success didn’t come easy. After high school, he’d applied for a job at Disney World in Orlando but was told nothing was available. Maybe they’d call him back in the future, Gad was told, but the future never arrived.
“For the next 25 years apparently nothing ever opened up,” he writes.
But when he read for the role in “Frozen,” Gad knew. “I don’t think I’ve ever tapped so quickly into a character as I did Olaf.” And with that, Gad had, at last, become a Disney icon.
Today Gad is a star of stage and screen as well as a happy husband and father. Even through a lifetime of anxiety and self-doubt, Gad never stopped believing in himself. As he writes in his book, “dreams really do come true when you work hard enough and never give up.”
