“My first time ever performing in front of an audience was [singing] ‘Your Song’ by Elton John,” Josh Rivera tells me, and I audibly gasp—I was in the audience at our Colorado high school for this performance. Rivera was a teenage idol in the Boulder musical theater scene, renowned for the soulful timbre of his voice and commanding stage presence. “I wanted to be a pop star. I wanted to be like Usher,” Rivera laughs. “That was the bug that bit me initially…There’s a vulnerability and exposure that’s simultaneously uncomfortable and also exhilarating.” After that Elton John performance, “theater seemed to me to be the most straightforward way of being able to [feel] that,” he says.

Rivera went on to study theater at Ithaca College, then joined the national tour of Hamilton and Steven Spielberg’s rendition of West Side Story. He spent the last few months gyrating through eight shows a week as the titular monster in The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway, but Rivera originally considered returning to Colorado post-college to “be in my community, and do theater around town,” he says—until a friend told him: “‘Josh, respectfully, you’re so fucking stupid.’” So he moved to New York City.

While working odd jobs, Rivera booked the Hamilton national tour. Then, Steven Spielberg was casting for West Side Story partially from the Hamilton cast. “I did not expect to book that,” says Rivera, who played Chino in the musical’s 2021 film remake. He went on to play Sejanus Plinth in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and land the lead role of Aaron Hernandez in Ryan Murphy’s American Sports Story before returning to the stage earlier this year. “Being a part of [Rocky Horror] is a pretty big full circle from my origins, because initially I thought I was going to do musical theater a lot more than I ended up doing it,” he says.

Preparing for Rocky, Rivera wanted to go extremely literal with his interpretation. “I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a baby that was somehow injected with an English lexicon, and also was immediately perceived as a sexual object, and how terrifying and exhilarating it would be,” he says. “That’s how I approached the role: I’m gonna play this as serious as possible because I’m a horny baby who’s 205 pounds and in great shape.” He jokes that doing photo shoots with this physique is great: “I’m not gonna look like this forever, so now I have my catfish pictures. Let me use them well into my 40s.”

Rivera is thoughtful about joining a show based on such a beloved piece of cult media. “It appeals to this strand of uniqueness in each person…I was very nervous, and to see the way people are responding to it, it’s really cool,” he says. “I think everybody who does theater in some capacity can relate to feeling like an outsider, and I think [the show] speaks to that feeling that exists in each of us.”

This story appears in the pages of VMAN 57: now available for purchase!

Photography Isaac Anthony

Fashion Arut Arustamyan

Grooming Ben Jones (The Only Agency) using Oribe & MERIT

Editor Kev Ponce

Fashion Market Editor Gabby Buchan

Executive Producer Kevin Warner (WAK Creative)

Production Manager Nick Lambrakis

Production Coordinator Drew Bosset

Lighting Technician Andrew Beadsworth

Digital Technician Katelyn Markham O’Halloran

Styling Assistant Galina Vyrva, Sienna Young, Copelyn Bengel

Grooming Assistant Marin Mullen

Production Assistant Juliet Lloyd

Director of Editorial Film Mynxii White

Location Minetta Lane Theatre