Netflix Queue | Krysta Rodriguez Brings the Razzle-Dazzle
Krysta Rodriquez stands with her hand on her waist. The shot is mostly black, with light on her arm, face, and background. She wears a black sequiny dress and smiles at something in the distance.

Liza with a K

Krysta Rodriguez brings the razzle-dazzle to Halston.

Opening photo by Atsushi Nishijima
18 June 202111 min read

When Krysta Rodriguez was in high school, she had a never-miss morning ritual. Theatrical teen that she was, this daily dose wasn’t so mundane as to involve the brushing of teeth or the gathering of books. Rather, Rodriguez made it a point to start her day studying Liza with a Z, dissecting Liza Minnelli’s sexy and sweaty rendition of “I Gotcha” from the now-legendary 1972 TV special. “I can still bring myself to tears talking about that performance. I have never seen something so raw and unfiltered,” she says. “It’s not about perfect technique or how high you can lift your legs. It’s about performing from the groin. Liza is connected in a way most performers aren’t. Even my young performer brain knew she was the holy grail.”

Years later, when Rodriguez was checking her phone during an intermission of Seared, a 2019 off-Broadway play (remember theater?), an email from her agent caught her eye. The first line said “Halston.” All right, so Rodriguez had heard of the mononymous designer who helped define fashion in the 1970s and 80s; she even had some of his pieces. The next lines mentioned series producer Ryan Murphy and star Ewan McGregor. She read on to learn she could audition for Halston in the role of Minnelli — Halston’s fashion muse, Studio 54 date, and devoted friend across decades of highs (snorted and otherwise) and lows (JCPenney and otherwise). “I started sweating and my heart started pounding,” Rodriguez recalls. “I can count on one hand the number of times where I was like, ‘This role is mine.’ It almost felt blasphemous to think I could do it. But if anybody couldn’t do it, I wanted to be the one who couldn’t.”

Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez) leans back in a chair, shrouded by a cloud of her cigarette smoke. She is dressed in all white, included fedora, and the eerie shot is lit only by a light fixture in the background.

Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez)

Director Daniel Minahan felt the same way. After working for two decades to bring Halston’s story to the screen, he felt strongly about who could portray Minnelli. “We had done a search of big-name actors. A lot of people put themselves on tape and sent us stuff, but I wanted a Broadway baby,” he says. Rodriguez walked into her first audition and sang him “You’ve Let Yourself Go,” then clinched the gig at their second meeting with her a cappella rendition of “Maybe This Time,” a song that helped Minnelli win her Cabaret Oscar. “Once I met Krysta, I knew there wasn’t anybody else worth considering,” Minahan says.

Rodriguez, a self-described straight-A-student-type, immediately started on her homework. That meant flinging herself into the Liza-verse, watching every piece of footage she could find, and gathering photos for inspiration. She had been singing and dancing on stage and screen for years, but she trained with a vocal coach to nail what Minahan refers to as “Liza’s breathy exuberance,” and she embraced 70s dance moves at Steps, Manhattan’s mecca to the dramatically jazzy. “You could quiz me on a date in her life, and I could tell you everything she did,” Rodriguez says. “What I realized is that what I knew about Liza was the derivative representation of her — which is fabulous, but I had to find my own version.”

For inspiration on how to play an icon without impersonating her, Rodriguez watched Judy— as in Minnelli’s mother, Judy Garland, and specifically Renée Zellweger’s Oscar-winning portrayal. “Renée Zellweger didn’t worry if she could sing like Judy, because nobody can. She didn’t worry if she could captivate an audience like Judy, because nobody can. But she found small mannerisms, like how she would let her right arm hang,” Rodriguez says. “I had to find that for Liza, and for me it was the way Liza uses her fingernails and has open hands and an open chest. It’s not necessarily recognizable details you know. It’s the stuff you didn’t know you knew.”

Joe Eula (David Pittu), Halston (Ewan McGregor), and Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez) stand in a row. Eula wears a fur coat, beret, glasses, and a mustache. Halston wears his signature jacket, and dark sunglasses. Minnelli wears all white, including a hat and fur.

Joe Eula (David Pittu), Halston (Ewan McGregor), and Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez)

For his part, Minahan made sure his entire cast knew as much as they possibly could, gathering them for Sunday night dinners to ask questions and pore over old photos. One weekend, he piled them all into a van and gave them a tour of important Halston haunts, beginning with brunch at Bergdorf Goodman, where Halston oversaw the millinery department, continuing on to the original Halston boutique location (now a Max Mara on Madison Avenue), and eventually making their way to Halston’s Upper East Side home, famously designed by Paul Rudolph and purchased in 2019 by Tom Ford. (In case you’re wondering, $18 million.)

Rodriguez also reached out to Minahan frequently, sending him interviews that showed a different side of Minnelli. “Most of her relationship with Halston was behind closed doors. I wanted to play that differently than how I played her when she was performing,” Rodriguez says. “I found clips where she’s shy and subtle, nothing like she was when she had a microphone in her hand.” Minahan encouraged her to ditch the cadence and dialect work when she was portraying Minnelli behind the scenes and just use her own voice. “You can do all the research you want, but you also have to understand what makes a person tick,” the director says. “When we decided Krysta wouldn’t imitate Liza in her personal moments, it was very freeing. Krysta and Liza have a similar earthy quality. It’s magical to watch because you really feel like she’s embodying her.”

It almost felt blasphemous to think I could do it. But if anybody couldn’t do it, I wanted to be the one who couldn’t.

Krysta Rodriguez

As Rodriguez dug into Minnelli’s inner life, a team of visual wizards assembled to Liza-fy the external. Step one was two straight days with a slew of wigs and test after test with full makeup. “Before we started, I looked through lots and lots and lots of pictures, books, and videos. Thankfully, it’s so easy to find so much,” says makeup department head Patricia Regan. The series spans five decades with Halston and Minnelli, so Regan played around with shading and the fullness of Minnelli’s face. At the top of the priority list were the eyes. “Liza’s eyes have the most specific shape. I would always try to drop Krysta’s corners just a little bit because that’s what Liza’s eyes do. It had to be subtle, but it had to be there.”

Things were going great until one day Minahan walked into the makeup room, stopped dead in his tracks, and proclaimed, “Krysta, you have blue eyes!” Several sets of hand-painted contact lenses were subsequently commissioned to achieve the precise shade of Minnelli’s irises. And then there were the eyelashes. “It’s almost perverse how big her lashes are,” laughs Rodriguez. “They’re so wrong, they’re right.” They sent Regan on a mad hunt to find a perfect pair. “I spent entire weekends going to lash shops,” she says. “Liza had a definite go-to lash, sometimes more filled in, sometimes top and bottom. But they were not the same as the crisscross lashes you see today — which are lovely but didn’t exist then. I always want to stay true to the period.” Luckily, Regan keeps a lash trunk (yes, you read that right) full of various lengths and colors — synthetic to mink, vintage and modern — from which she glued together the perfect look.

Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez) is held horizontally by a person wearing leather pants. Her mouth is wide, she brandishes a black hat that matches her black ensemble. The shot was taken mid-show, as we’re able to distinguish audience heads below.

Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez)

When it came time to design reproductions of the famous Halston red-sequin minidress and banana-yellow wedding suit, costume designer Jeriana San Juan threw on some Liza tunes, picked the brains of former Halston employees, and went to work recreating and re-envisioning. “Getting to dress Liza is an excitement level beyond 10,” she says. “She has iconic looks that live eternally in the zeitgeist, but I loved digging and doing research to get a more intimate view into her style.” That style, pre-Halston, was more . . . well, let’s just say in Episode 1 we hear the designer refer to Minnelli’s early style as reminiscent of Buster Brown. “Halston’s influence on Liza is a tactile thing. You can see it not only in her clothes but in how she carried herself,” San Juan says. “His clothes gave her a confidence, and after his effect on her, an audience could connect with her as a glamour icon on a whole other level.”

Halston’s designs gave Liza an emotional zhuzh, and San Juan tried to give a similar sartorial reassurance to Rodriguez, whom she knew from their days working together on Smash. (For all you Smashers, no, Rodriguez was not on set when Minnelli guest-starred, though she did meet her backstage after a performance of Spring Awakening.) The costume designer never signed off on a look without first filming Rodriguez doing a full dance number in it to make sure she felt physically free. You may have to pause to fully appreciate San Juan’s favorite look, an ultra-fabulous Studio 54 sparkly get-up with matching obi belt and kimono jacket, meticulously duplicated. “I actually reached out to Naeem Khan, who was a former assistant to Halston himself,” she says. “The bead work was so specific, I wanted someone who was there to do it.” That said, she did take artistic liberties with the color, going with an orchid hue, an homage to Halston’s favorite flower, as opposed to the dark purple Minnelli actually wore.

The visual transformation was so precise that even Regan mistook a framed photo of Rodriguez-as-Minnelli for an actual archival shot. “Oh my god,” she thought, “this actually worked!” Rodriguez, meanwhile, took home some of the show’s replicas of Andy Warhol’s paintings of Minnelli. “Yes, I now own fake, giant-scale Andy Warhols,” she laughs, noting that they’re currently leaning in a back room of her home. “To see your face in that Andy Warhol style is surreal. They’re my prized possessions, but I don’t know what to do with them.”

A row of models wear beautiful shimmery gowns. From left to right, there is pink, pistachio green, yellow, black, purple, and metallic gold. Minnelli stands in the middle, in black, next to Peretti in purple. They smile, presumably at the end of the show.

Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez), Elsa Peretti (Rebecca Dayan), and Halston runway models

Rodriguez rhapsodizes about almost the entire shoot, from the familial bond Minahan fostered on set to the kindness of McGregor — who made her feel so comfortable between takes of a scene where Halston tears his design off of Minnelli that she completely forgot she was standing around naked. Her tone only changes when she recalls how she heard that production would be shutting down because of COVID-19 not even a month into shooting. “All of a sudden, life came to a screeching halt and Liza became the least of my worries,” says Rodriguez. When she got the call six months later that it was safe to return, she had relocated to Kansas and was renovating a house, getting covered in sewage and dirt, as far as you could get from sequins and fashion shows. “I don’t even know if I considered myself an actor anymore, I was so immersed in this new interior design passion,” she recalls. “I just thought, Well, I guess I gotta get back into fighting shape.

Ultimately, Rodriguez concluded her Liza journey in much the same way as she began it, with “I Gotcha.” Filming the number she had memorized as a teenager, she thrust her pelvis, bobbed her head around, and strutted diva-like across the stage. “It’s 20 seconds in the show, but we rehearsed for months. I let it all out; I flung off everything I’d done with this woman for a year and put it into that performance.” When Minahan yelled “Cut!” the crew, which was shooting from a higher floor, ran down to applaud the performance. “I knew in my mind that I was wrapped, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave,” she says. “All of a sudden, my neck started hurting. I took Tylenol and practically started hallucinating from all the adrenaline coursing through me.” When she woke up the following morning, she could barely move: “I will never forget that feeling that I had been through some kind of exorcism. I guess I just really loved living in Liza.”