Alex Newell Is Time's Breakthrough of the Year

Alex Newell, having made history as one of the first two out nonbinary Tony Award winners, has been named Time’s Breakthrough of the Year for 2023.

Newell won the Tony this year as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for playing whiskey distiller Lulu in Shucked, a show about a corn-reliant small town. Another nonbinary performer, J. Harrison Ghee, won the Tony as Best Lead Actor in a Musical for Some Like It Hot.

In accepting the Tony last June, Newell said, “Thank you for seeing me, Broadway. I should not be up here as a queer nonbinary fat black lil’ baby from Massachusetts. To anyone that thinks they can’t do it, I’m going to look you dead in your face [and say] that you can do anything you put your mind to.”

Regarding the Breakthrough of the Year honor, Newell told Time they want to bring “normalcy” to the world. “I want every story that someone has, that’s personal to them, to be something that is not taboo, but normal,” Newell said. “I don’t want to ever feel othered, and I don’t want anybody else like me to feel [othered]. I want any story that I tell to just be another run-of-the-mill story that just happens to look like me and be who I am.”

They believe theater is trying to become more inclusive. “With trying comes mistakes, and with trying comes error,” Newell noted, adding that “incremental change” isn’t always visible, and now it’s a question of keeping up the progress.

Newell first gained fame by playing Unique Adams on Glee in 2012; Unique was one of the first transgender characters on a prime-time TV show. They went on to play Mo, a gender-fluid DJ, on Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, and they made their Broadway debut in 2017 in a revival of Once on This Island.

Image: Thea Traff/Time Magazine