Jonathan Groff has signed on to star opposite Daniel Radcliffe in Trust the Man, the Vietnam War thriller that is headed to New Jersey for a summer shoot. The casting gives the project another Broadway-tested lead and reunites Groff with Radcliffe after their work together in Merrily We Roll Along.
The move matters now because Groff only recently finished his Tony-nominated Broadway turn as Bobby Darin in Just in Time, which he also produced, while Radcliffe has just come off his own Tony-nominated run in Every Brilliant Thing. Both shows have fully recouped, giving the pair fresh momentum as they shift back to film.
Trust the Man was first announced last February ahead of EFM and is written and directed by Will Graham. It follows an ambitious Army Intelligence officer who is assigned to investigate a decorated soldier with a mysterious past during the Vietnam War, as surveillance and interrogation deepen and the line between loyalty and obsession blurs. Groff and Radcliffe previously shared the stage in the multiple Tony Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, making this their first film pairing.
One role detail is still being kept back. Lucas Hedges had previously been set to star opposite Radcliffe before dropping out because of scheduling issues, and the new casting restores the project’s central pairing without yet saying which part Groff will play. That missing piece matters less than the larger fact: the film now has its leads, its writer-director and a summer start date in New Jersey.
Groff is not waiting around for the camera to roll. He is already in production on Lin Manuel Miranda’s film adaptation of the musical Octet and is soon due to make his Royal Shakespeare Company debut as Rosalind in an all-male production of As You Like It. For Trust the Man, though, the immediate story is simpler. The movie has a cast, a setting and a date, and the last unanswered question is whether Groff’s part will make this reunion feel like a stage encore or something stranger.
