Missionary Man

 O’Malley is referring to Broadway Impact, the coalition of theater professionals raising funds and organizing events in support of marriage equality that he founded in December 2008 with friends Jenny Kanelos and Gavin Creel. After working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as a volunteer in Cleveland, O’Malley returned to New York City to try to find a place for theater folk to express frustration over the passage of California’s Proposition 8. “For Broadway people to really make a push for equality, we knew we had to own our part of the movement,” he says.

In a mere 10 days Broadway Impact planned a rally to support New York governor David Paterson’s marriage equality bill in 2009; it was attended by more than 5,000 people, and featured speakers including Cheyenne Jackson, Cynthia Nixon, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Paterson himself. “We didn’t sleep for 10 days, but it was awesome,” O’Malley says. The group also arranged free transportation for 1,400 performers and fans to attend the National Equality March that year in Washington, D.C. “The challenge now is to continue rising to the occasion and finding new ways to get the theater community involved,” he says.

As he gears up for The Book of Mormon’s opening, O’Malley may be going through the busiest time in his career thus far, but he continues to make time for the cause. “For a long time I felt it would hinder my acting if I focused on anything else, but I found myself wanting to broaden my horizons,” he says. “There comes a point when you have to be more than an actor, and doing something else that means a lot to me has actually made me a stronger actor. It’s stimulated something else in my brain and heart.”

O’Malley swears that the prospect of marrying Gerold Schroeder, his boyfriend of three years, has never driven his activism. “Hey, one thing at a time,” he says with a laugh. “Straight people don’t have the right to get married because they want to get married. It’s about equality!” It’s this kind of passion that inspires Schroeder, who isn’t in show business, to call O’Malley an “actorvist.” Or “Norma Rae.” “He started saying that to annoy me,” O’Malley says, “but now I’m trying to own it.”