Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  Tom Hewitt, left, as Pontius Pilate, and Paul Nolan as JesusÂ in the coming revival of âJesus Christ Superstar.â  After all, that credit is surrounded by a murderer’s row of onstage evildoers that makes Steve Buscemi and Christopher Walken look like Good Humor men. (For the record Mr. Hewitt played the Titanic’s designer in 2010.) The last year alone has seen him play two pirates — Long John Silver and Captain Hook — and a Pilate. This last baddie, Pontius Pilate, comes courtesy of the revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which opens Thursday at the Neil Simon Theater.  What’s a nice fellow like Mr. Hewitt doing making a career out of playing vampires, swindlers, crucifiers and carnivores?  “When I was young, I did the leading men,” Mr. Hewitt, 54, said recently in his dressing room the day after his first “Superstar” preview. “But those kind of characters, you know, the play sort of happens to them. Whereas the villains make the play happen.”  “Plus,” he added, “I’m tall and kind of creepy looking.”  Tall, yes, and prone to making points with a firm rap of his fingers on the dressing room table. But Des McAnuff would disagree with this last reason. Mr. McAnuff, the director of the “Superstar” revival (which began its life at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, where he is the artistic director), described Mr. Hewitt as a combination of George Clooney and Freddie Mercury. “Tom has an abundance of charm,” he said. “Now, charm is hard to define, but I would say it’s someone you enjoy spending time with. And that comes particularly handy with villains.”  And so he has chosen to spend time with Mr. Hewitt on three shows: Pilate was preceded by the title role in Frank Wildhorn’s critically savaged “Dracula, the Musical” in 2004 (the tactful Mr. Hewitt had many laudatory things to say about the show’s special effects) and the predatory Komarovsky in a new musical adaptation of “Dr. Zhivago” at La Jolla Playhouse in California in 2006.  Along the way there have also been more than 500 performances as the sleazy lawyer Billy Flynn in “Chicago” (“between celebrities they fill me in”), as well as a similarly amoral turn in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and an acclaimed Long John Silver in last year’s Off Broadway adaptation of “Treasure Island.” And his turns as Scar in “The Lion King” and Captain Hook in “Peter Pan” earned their share of boos from young lungs in the audience. Quite a switch from the 12 years a young Mr. Hewitt spent working with the revered theater director Tadashi Suzuki, which included avant-garde stagings of Western classics in the Japanese mountain village of Toga as well as in the United States.  “He probably gets his kicks playing these horrible characters because that’s so, so not who he is,” said Cathy Rigby, who crossed swords with Mr. Hewitt in “Peter Pan” both in New York and on tour. “He came in on the last day of tech rehearsal with breakfast for the entire stage crew.”  Sure enough, “I really love the opportunity to be angry,” said Mr. Hewitt, who described himself as a classic introvert who relishes escaping to the Putnam County, N.Y., lake house he shares with the actor Edward Staudenmayer, his partner of 15 years, and their dog. “So many of these characters — Captain Hook is furious with Pan, Pilate is furious with first Jesus and then the mob — express this rage that I have trouble expressing in my life, sometimes to a fault.”  “They tend to be complex characters,” he continued, “and often flamboyant. And so you get to add on behaviors that you wouldn’t ordinarily express.” His Tony Award-nominated turn as Dr. Frank ’N’ Furter in the freewheeling 2000 revival of “The Rocky Horror Show” put this disparity in stark relief. As any midnight movie fan will tell you, Frank ’N’ Furter’s castle is no place for an introvert, and the addition of audience participation threw Mr. Hewitt for a loop. It took a backstage intervention from his co-star Joan Jett — “she literally grabbed me by the collar one day and said, ‘You need to rock ’n’ roll out’ ” — before he could do justice to the role.  “He’s an accidental star,” said Norbert Leo Butz, who spent three months starring alongside Mr. Hewitt in the 2006 “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” tour. “I think of him as Broadway’s Cary Grant, but I don’t think he went out even one night after a performance. He really saves his energy for the show.”  Mr. Hewitt said his natural reticence had also prevented him from pursuing much television or film work, although he had done voice-over work for advertisements for “War Horse,” “Other Desert Cities” and several other Broadway shows.  “Jesus Christ Superstar,” last seen on Broadway in an indifferently received 2000 production, allows Mr. Hewitt — who joined the otherwise intact Stratford company in its pre-Broadway run at La Jolla Playhouse — to share the burdens of villainy. Sure, Pontius Pilate finally orders the Crucifixion, but Caiaphas and his cabal of priests force the issue, to say nothing of the bloodthirsty mob.  As Mr. McAnuff put it, “Pilate spends much of ‘Superstar’ trying to avoid doing the thing he ends up doing.” All this in under 15 minutes of stage time — which means a lot of standing backstage for Mr. Hewitt, whose purple crushed-velvet suit all but forbids sitting.  Luckily, Mr. McAnuff said, his Pilate knows how to do a lot in a little bit of time. “Tom has a kind of focused calmness that is very magnetic,” he said. “He brings the audience to him. He’s not pushy in that way. He knows how to be still and create oceans within.”  Ms. Rigby described this sensation more succinctly: “When he looks at you, he scares you.”  Taking only a share of the “Superstar” spotlight also spares Mr. Hewitt some unwelcome attention after those 15 minutes are up. He hasn’t always been so lucky.  “In ‘Chicago’ the guy playing Billy is often called on to give post-show speeches,” he said. “Every other show, it’s ‘Sofia Vergara is leaving the production,’ ‘Captain Sullenberger’s in the audience,’ ” the latter a reference to Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the hero pilot who landed his plane in the Hudson River in 2009. “I would spend the show backstage obsessing about how to appear natural and say. ‘Captain Sully’ off the cuff. It was torturous.”
Tom Hewitt, previously a vampire, a tiger and a swindler, now takes on Pilate in the Broadway revival of âJesus Christ Superstar.â