‘The Shards’ Star Jordan Roth on the Beautiful Irony of His Acting Debut and Leaning Into His Dark Side

[This story contains major spoilers from The Shards finale, “Stairway to Heaven.”]

The Shards‘ first season came to a near-deadly conclusion. For eight episodes, FX and Ryan Murphy‘s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 2023 young adult novel darkly toyed with the dualities and dichotomies of its core ensemble — from power and personalities to sexuality and literal reality. Amid a constant jockeying for control, be it of their own lives or even each other, this rich and glamorous group teetered for a season between their best and worst impulses.

In the season finale, “Stairway to Heaven,” many of those worst impulses won out. In the end, a gruesome serial killer’s spree, alongside the personal and collective upheaval their presence has wrought, touches Bret (Igby Rigney) and his inner circle in a new, unsettling way with the murder of producer Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley). The whodunnit cliffhanger, which posits that just about any one of the characters could be the culprit, is the result of a splintering not only from Ellis’ text, but of the friendships and even psyches among this glossy gaggle of ‘80s high school elites.

In the episode’s final moments, set to The Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the camera pans across a holding room, everyone striking a pose as they await police questioning. And with his stark bleached eyebrows and an electric blue silhouette, Terry’s long-time assistant Steven, played by Jordan Roth, is hard to miss among the fitted shirts, feathered hair, and cigarette smoke.

On the heels of a midseason where “you begin to see him pulling strings and turning screws,” says Roth, Steven ends the season with a smug smirk, illustrating that he can not only keep up, but potentially even kill, with the best of these frequently solipsistic adolescents and adults.

“I decided very early on that Steven was always scanning for information and secrets. So what you see him doing, even when he’s not speaking or even the focus of a scene, is watching,” Roth tells THR about Steven. “Look what she just did! I’ll save that for later. … Uh oh! I dropped that little pebble into the water, and look what he did with that. I’ll take that for later. Part of his art is strategy.”

The rest, however, has been a bit of tortured artistry. “I was profoundly moved when Ryan [Murphy] gave me the line: ‘I am an artist. I am a professional. I have something to offer and something to say,’” he says of taking on the role Murphy pitched him. “The pain of the artist is knowing that, and nobody is seeing or listening. That is a pain that so many of us experience, whether we call ourselves artists or not.

“On the surface, Steven is a real ‘other,’” he continues. “You really get to see that he speaks for all of us, which I think is one of the real genius talents of Ryan. He is able to create these characters who seem so singular and one-of-one, but then he gives them this foundational existential core that speaks for all of us and speaks to all of us — to our pain and our yearning.”

In Ellis’ own ambiguous book ending, the serial killer named The Trawler is never identified, but following the events of the finale, Steven’s potential as Terry’s attacker, let alone The Trawler, has dramatic potential for Roth. “He is capable of anything,” he says. “Good, bad, and indifferent.”

Steven’s larger arc, the actor shares, has been fully pitched to him by Murphy, and is part of a slight book-to-screen change designed to extend the storyline beyond a single season. (Murphy and Ellis planned for a three-or-four season adaptation; an official season two renewal has yet to be announced.)

Like several of the other characters now roped into this crime of passion plot, it’s a fitting pivot for the aggrieved, overlooked assistant. “What we do with the experience of being constantly underestimated, or constantly unseen, that manifests in lots of different ways,” Roth explains of being an option on the murder board. “For Steven, it can and has manifested as rage, as skulduggery, as scheming and strategizing.”

It has also appeared as a form of resilience by way of a foolish or enviable optimism. “In each of the scenes that you see him, he engages once again, once again, once again. He comes to the experience with ‘Maybe this time,’” Roth explains. “So all those scenes of the Hamburger Hamlet when he’s presenting, he brings Debbie (Hayes Warner) the style out for the dance-off, the float — ‘They’ve got to see it now, right? Look what I’m bringing. Maybe this time.’ And then no. He keeps coming to each exchange with, ‘This is it because now it’s undeniable,’ and it keeps being denied.”

By the finale, Steven is one of the show’s clearest examples of how this darker, twisted take on coming of age plays not only with what we do in the process of becoming, but the duality and dichotomies that can beset that journey. Through Roth’s TV acting debut, a somewhat meta twist on his own creative journey and life also emerges. “There is a certain beautiful irony in my and Steven’s kinship,” he acknowledges.

The self-proclaimed mastermind behind Terry’s successful producing career (best evidenced by his hunches about the cinematic potential of Bret’s novel Less Than Zero), Steven exists on the lowest rung within the hierarchy of The Shard’s indulgent, aloof, and entitled inner circle. A frequent afterthought, his years of work go underappreciated while he begrudgingly buoys those around him.

In contrast, Roth’s own experience is as a visible cultural (and cultured) impresario. The child of New York real estate titan Steven Roth and Broadway mogul Daryl Roth, the actor, producer and self-described fashion storyteller has spent much of his life in the upper echelons. After attending a private Ivy in the Bronx, he graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Business School.

Despite spending his early years performing on the stage, one of his first major brushes with dramatic success came in 2001 with The Rocky Horror Show revival, scoring multiple Tony nominations as a Broadway producer by the time most 20-somethings’ brains are only just fully developed. Less than a decade later, he became attached to Jujamcyn Theaters, first as a producer, then as its co-owner — the youngest theater owner on Broadway at the time — followed by majority shareholder and now Creative Director for ATG Entertainment.

When that wasn’t enough, he ventured into what he describes as narrative fashion performance, producing Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty at Paris’ Louvre Museum. Somewhere in between, he became a hyper-visible face on Hollywood and New York carpets, one of social media’s leading fashion authorities, and a presence on magazine covers and at runways.

“Steven is nothing like me. He doesn’t look like me. He doesn’t sound like me. He doesn’t move like me. He certainly does things and says things I would never do, say, or allow myself to even consider,” Roth says. If he were real, Roth might be the kind of person Steven resents, like the kids of Buckley Prep. But Roth is quick to point out how that tension is about something bigger and a message at the core of the series itself.

“We all have ways in which we are perceived that are projected onto us, and it is interesting, isn’t it, that we all are being projected on by each other,” he reflects. “If we could all put down our projectors, we might be able to not just see each other more clearly, but enjoy the experience of being seen.”

There’s also what Roth clearly sees in both himself and Steven, despite being “wildly different in almost every way” — a willingness to do the work, take risks and have the courage and foresight to deliver successfully. “I am not afraid of having to prove myself. Period,” Roth says gently about navigating his creative and business careers. “What is hard is when you don’t feel like you have the opportunity.”

In the finale, Steven’s deep want to become a producer drives him to his potential tipping point. In real life, Roth has yearned to be on the other side of the stage and camera. “Externally and internally, we do share the desire to be seen and the pain of not being seen,” he explains. “I, too, for a very long time, experienced knowing I can do this. I know I’m an actor. I trained as an actor as a young person. This was always my plan and ambition. I started producing not as a grand plan, but because I got involved in one specific show that I wanted to help happen, and then my life took off in that wonderful, very satisfying direction. But I never lost my actor’s heart.

“I didn’t know how to find my way back. So for a very long time, I was experiencing that same feeling, that sense of, I know it’s in here, and why can’t anybody see? What do I have to do to make somebody see?” he continues. “This is the blessing of this experience. Ryan gave me the opportunity to prove myself through Steven’s path. My dream fulfilled ended up being that I play the pain of the same dream unfulfilled.”

Roth adds that where he and Steven connect also lives in the shared “experience of people making assumptions about us, and dismissing us because of what we look like and how we present.” The actor worked with Murphy on the character’s head-to-toe style, crafting an aesthetic that largely shirks his book counterpart’s turtlenecks for something more visually inspired — nodding to the runways of Europe and two Davids who became their own sort of Goliaths, British musicians Sylvian and Bowie.

Steven’s look undoubtedly catches one’s eye. It’s the image of someone openly testing boundaries, uninterested in shame, hiding, invisibility. He wants you to see. In many ways, it’s the complete opposite of the other gay and queer men in The Shards, who, to varying degrees, live almost double lives. In the eason finale, that unapologeticness is ultimately punished by Terry, a man who has, in his darkly impenitent way, concealed himself.

“That speech that Terry lobs at Steven — ‘Do you think I can take you into these rooms with these people?’ — that is my life in reverse. I created for myself a uniform of what I believed I had to look like to do the job that I was doing,” Roth says. “This takes us back to that first production that became the beginning of my producing career. I was 22 years old. I was producing my first show. Everybody who worked with me and for me was older than me, and I created this uniform of experience and authority, and it stuck. It fused on me because I thought that’s what I needed to do to do this job that was really important to me.”

Unlike Steven, Roth adds, it was only after reaching particular levels of experience and success that he realized, “I don’t have to dress like a producer. I am a producer, and so a producer dresses how I dress. That took a long time. I missed a lot of living, and it didn’t happen very easily because I had a long period of, ‘Who will they think I am?’” he says. “The reason those voices that keep us in our boxes are so powerful is that they sound a lot like our own. So we think, ‘This is what I think.’ It’s not what you think. But it’s really hard to distinguish, isn’t it?”

While The Shards finale teases the worst of what Steven is capable of, Roth notes that there is another side to his pendulum he wants to illuminate. “I love this character, this human. I love the company of actors I get to create with, and the extraordinary creative team making this show,” says the actor. “My fingers are crossed for season two because there’s so much more story for Steven to explore. Steven created himself before he was in the room, and he is knocking on that door as loudly as he possibly can. I really hope he gets in.”

Roth has similar aspirations for himself. While the Broadway producer has projects lined up, including the new musical Galileo announced earlier this year, Roth tells THR, “there is no turning back now” about his next chapter in acting.

Even if Steven can’t make his own dreams possible, The Shards star is confident the character will continue to help him get there.

“I’m really excited to continue to find, fight for, and prove myself in roles that allow me to explore in lots of different ways a range of humans, and the blueprint of that actually exists in Steven a bit,” he says. “Steven is a character of scale, and I am very excited by characters of scale. That could be Lynchian characters, which I know Steven has been described as, and I love that. It could be characters in epic fantasy. The other thing about Steven is his wit, his dark comedy. I’m very excited to explore different ways of living in the darkness of comedy. Also, really, anything that Tilda Swinton passes on, I want to read for it.”

The Shards is now streaming all episodes on Hulu. Read THR‘s show coverage here.