Constantine Rousouli Felt 'Pigeonholed' as a Broadway Leading Man. So He Co-Created “Titanique” on His Own Terms

After years of being boxed into traditional leading man roles, the actor stepped away from Broadway — and came back with a show that lets him be fully himself

NEED TO KNOW

• Constantine Rousouli returned to Broadway by co-creating and starring in the Céline Dion-infused musical Titanique
• The actor tells PEOPLE he stepped away from Broadway for nearly a decade to break free from being typecast as a traditional leading man
• Titanique, now a Broadway hit, began as a small Los Angeles dinner theater show and has grown into an award-winning sensation

Constantine Rousouli didn't just return to Broadway: he built the right way back.

For nearly a decade, the actor — who made his debut as Link Larkin in Hairspray and later appeared as Fiyero in Wicked and in Ghost: The Musical — stayed away from the Main Stem, walking away from musical theater's biggest stages. And it wasn't for lack of opportunity; it was, in part, by design.

“I left the industry 10 years ago and told myself, 'The only way I'm going to come back to New York City is if it's on my own terms,' " he tells PEOPLE.

Those terms, it turned out, required more than just the right role. They required building a whole show from scratch.

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That reinvention arrived in the form of Titanique, the irreverent, Céline Dion–scored sendup of Titanic that Rousouli co-wrote with Tye Blue and Marla Mindelle and now stars in on Broadway. In it, he plays Jack — a version of Leonardo DiCaprio's romantic hero reimagined through his own brand of “Golden Retriever energy.”

“I wanted to show everyone what I could really do,” he recalls, of crafting the musical. “As a writer, it was a chance to show off my sense of humor, my storytelling instincts, my knowledge of what works in the structure of a successful show. And as an actor, it was about bringing my fun, weird, goofy self to this role, while also stay true to what people love the most about it. And I couldn't be prouder by what we've accomplished."

The musical, now playing a limited engagement at the St. James Theatre through Sept. 20, represents something rarer than a comeback. It is a correction.

Throughout his early career, Rousouli found himself navigating a narrow idea of what a leading man should be. Fresh out of high school and just 17 years old when he was cast in Hairspray, he says he had to mold himself into a limited vision of what roles openly gay actors could play. There were expectations, spoken and unspoken, about how he should present himself.

"I couldn't be anything like myself. I was always put up for the Danny Zucco-types or the Jets or the teenage jock, where I had to play it all very straight," he says. “My agents would be like, ‘Hey, we're going to need you to butch it up a little bit for this audition.' I had to watch my Ps and Qs. I couldn't be too flamboyant.”

It wasn't that he lacked range. It was that the industry, at the time, struggled to imagine it.

“People have a hard time seeing past their perception,” he explains. “They pigeonhole you because they're like, ‘Oh, well, he's gay. He can't play that or he can't play this.' So I had to fight that my entire career. And it's like, 'I'm an actor. I can play whatever you need me to play. Just let me show you.' ”

After years of adapting, Rousouli hit a wall. Stepping away from Broadway, he moved to Los Angeles and booked roles on Charmed, 9-1-1, The Other Two and one memorable episode of AJ and the Queen that led to viral fame. But Hollywood wasn't enough.

"Los Angeles is where dreams go to die," he jokes. "And five years in, it was like, 'This isn't working. Maybe it's time to do what everyone else says and create my own stuff?' "

When he began developing Titanique with Mindelle and Blue, who he met at an L.A. dinner theater, Rousouli approached it as an opportunity to break that pattern — not subtly, but completely.

“I was like, 'I'm not going to typecast myself like I have my entire career. I'm going to show them that a leading man can be whatever the f— you want it to be. You can play with whatever colors you want in the crayon box.' " he explains. "So I said, 'What are my strongest suits? What haven't I done yet?' And I built from there to hone in on what I bring to the forefront."

Onstage, that philosophy translates into a performance that is loose while also being physical and deceptively demanding.

The Jack he created is both homage and rebellion. There are echoes of DiCaprio's original performance — the tousled hair, the boyish charm, the impossible-to-resist smile — but they're filtered through Rousouli's own sensibility: playful, elastic, knowingly theatrical. He leans into comedy, into absurdity and into a version of masculinity that refuses to sit still. And he does so all while sustaining a heightened, almost cartoonish charm, with singing and dancing that never quits.

“If I'm going to do this on my terms and come back, I'm going to do it at the fullest capacity possible,” he said. “I'm from the school of old-school Broadway… you go full-out. There's no middle ground. So it's zero or 100.”

Critics and audiences have responded, championing Rousouli's performance and Titanique as a whole (both he and the musical are currently up for a number of industry awards, with the Tony Award nominations looming).

The hilarious comedy — which also stars Jim Parsons, Melissa Barrera, Deborah Cox, Layton Williams, Frankie Grande and John Riddle — has had a long road to Broadway, with Rousouli, Mindelle and Blue pushing forward step by step. It began as a one-night concert at a dinner theater in Los Angeles back in 2017 before slowly building buzz through downtown New York runs, including Off-Broadway stints at the Asylum NYC (a theater literally in the basement of a since-closed NYC grocery store) and a breakout engagement at the Daryl Roth Theatre.

From there, it became a word-of-mouth sensation, spawning productions around the world and even landing in London's West End, where it took home the Olivier Award for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play.

Now one of Broadway's hottest tickets, Rousouli gets emotional looking back on the journey.

“If you told me when I was a kid that I would have my own show on Broadway that I would be starring in, I would have said you're absolutely crazy,” he says. “But the fact that it's become a reality and that so many people have embraced it, it's like, 'Wow, hard work really does pay off.' "

Growing up in New Jersey, Rousouli would travel into the city with his mother to see shows, later sneaking in on his own to student rush whatever he could. “It became our thing,” he says. “I would be like, ‘Hey, Ma, right after work, you're coming to the city — we're seeing this, we're seeing that.' And she was always game.”

His mother, Penny, remains central to his story — “my rock,” he calls her, praising her constant support. She was even his date to opening night. "Penny was the belle of the ball," Rousouli laughs. "Everyone just loves her. And we look exactly alike, it's sick."

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His father Charlie, who died of cancer in 2019, left a different kind of imprint on Rousouli. “I am a spitting image of my father's soul,” he says. “He was loud and funny. I mean, talk about comedic genius. His one-liners were truly not to be believed. I get that gift from him."

It is, in many ways, the same energy that now defines his performance — loud, joyful and uncontainable.

There is a temptation, in stories like this, to frame the ending as triumph. But Rousouli resists that simplicity. What has changed most, he says, is not just his career, but his sense of worth within it.

It took taking time away from Broadway to fully realize that shift. “I had imposter syndrome,” he admits. “I didn't think I deserved it… I was a child. I was petrified.”

Now, that feeling is gone. “I feel like I'm finally worthy of my confidence and my talent,” he says. “I've worked my ass off.”

The result is a return that reads less like a comeback and more like a reintroduction — one that breaks free of the box Rousouli once worked inside, and that reflects who he is, onstage and off.

“It's not that deep, we're doing musical theater!" he says. "We're trying to make people laugh and bring joy to humanity. That's the bigger picture. Just come in to the theater, sit for 90 minutes, and have fun. That's all I want."

With what Rousouli helped build on his own terms? Mission accomplished.

Tickets for Titanique are now on sale.

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