Shooting a movie musical can be as complicated as an action blockbuster dominated by green screens and CG visual effects. For the past few decades, directors, for the most part, have preferred to have their stars sing live on set as opposed to lip-syncing a pre-recorded track. That often means an actor is singing their hearts out listening to the background music coming through an earpiece as their voices project acapella to a crew of often fifty or more people on set. That might intimidate many performers, especially those who haven’t sung publicly before, but not Kaitlyn Dever. The “Dear Evan Hansen” star says she was more focused on doing her character, Zoe Murphy, justice on the big screen.
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“I completely take myself out of it. And once you take yourself away from it, you’re able to just be Zoe Murphy and not judge yourself, because I’m actually not playing myself. I’m playing Zoe Murphy and I’m not playing Kaitlyn,” Dever says. “So, it was really a very eye-opening experience. And singing with Ben [Platt] in Evan’s bedroom, it was just, it was really magical, honestly. Magical for that reason, but also magical because I was getting to experience Ben singing a lot of these songs for maybe the last time, and that was something that I’ll never forget watching him sing ‘For Forever.’”
Reflecting on the experience, Dever pauses, adding, “I’ll never forget watching Amy Adams watch Ben Platt sing take after take. She was crying her eyes out every time he opened his mouth. He is such an amazing singer that I felt like the luckiest person in the world to be able to witness that and to be able to watch him sing these songs that he’s lived with for so long and knows so well and singing them for the last time, it made me really emotional and made me feel just made me feel very lucky and have like a lot of gratitude. And it was cool.”
Directed by Stephen Chobosky and adapted for the screen by Steven Levenson, “Dear Evan Hansen” follows the title character (Ben Platt, reprising his Tony Award-winning role), a high school senior who suffers from crippling social anxiety. When Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a fellow student, commits suicide, Evan becomes trapped in a misunderstanding over a letter found on Connor’s person. The major benefit of Evan’s predicament, however, is that it allows him to get closer to his longtime crush, Connor’s sister Zoe (Dever).
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Acting professionally from a very early age, Dever has starred in a wide variety of films and TV projects including “Booksmart,” “Justified,” “Last Man Standing,” “Short Term 12” and “Detroit.” What’s she’s never done before was sing on screen. It turns out, however, that both she and her sister have spent the last decade or so practicing their singing and songwriters skills in private for an eventual musical project.
“It feels like a thing we do for the love of, it feels like a side hobby of ours.,” Dever says. “And we do it because we love singing together and we’re sisters and we’re each other’s best friends. So it’s just a very nice, comforting experience for both of us. But that’s always been just only that. I’ve never done it to the degree of doing it in a movie and memorizing like specificities of the songs and songs that have already existed in the world for several years and songs that are so widely loved by so many people and getting all of it exactly right, and basically doing [all of the] Zoe Murphy’s before me justice. It was all very exciting and I was working a new part of my brain and which I love doing.”
Despite an incredible experience making the film, Dever is understandably trying to reconcile some initially harsh reviews following the picture’s world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Reviews that were somewhat vicious considering how beloved the original source material is whether staged on Broadway, the West End, or smaller productions around the world.
“I mean, I obviously came to this project having so much love and passion for it as did everybody,” Dever says. “And I’d say that I never have any expectations for anything that I do. All I have is just a deep, deep love for it when I’m doing it in the moment. And then, whatever happens, happens because life happens. And I think the movie is really special. And I think that the film is, I think we really made something very, very special. And I think it resonates with a lot of people, and the original Broadway show really helped a lot of people through some really, really bad times and how it moved people in some really big ways, and I think the film is going to do that.”
Dever says she’s also excited that it’s heading to theaters first. Especially considering how difficult the last 18 months have been for many around the world.
“I think that it’s a movie that you can really experience with an audience and you can laugh and you can cry, and you can really feel all of these feelings that these characters are having in the film,” Dever says. “But, I’m reading a lot of people, [that] there are like standing ovations for screenings at ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and people are really, really loving it. And I’m, really excited about it because I only have passion for this project as does everybody else involved. So I think it’s, really, really special.”
“Dear Evan Hansen” opens nationwide on Friday.