Former Rice basketball player Chadd Alexander talks Broadway show ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’

By Chi Pham     9/2/25 9:30pm

Underneath Chadd Alexander’s Broadway costume, there’s ankle tape and wrist braces — same protective gear he wore as a walk-on basketball player at Rice, though now he’s performing eight shows a week in the ensemble of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” instead of running conditioning drills in Tudor Fieldhouse.

“It’s bizarrely similar,” Alexander ’10 said. “When you’re in the dressing room getting ready to perform, it’s like being in the locker room and getting ready to play.”

Alexander transferred to Rice from NYU and walked onto the basketball team, playing for two years while studying English literature. Theater wasn’t on his radar: though he had performed in Hal Prince’s “Show Boat” Broadway revival as a child, he’d abandoned acting in middle school to follow his brother into athletics.

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Everything changed junior year when Alexander needed an art credit to graduate. Only Leslie Swackhamer’s theater course on scene study — the acting technique of analyzing scripts to uncover character motivations and subtext — fit his basketball schedule.

“It was a ‘whatever’ class to me,” Alexander said. “I became obsessed. It kind of reignited that passion that I thought was completely in the past. I just loved … the process of becoming somebody else.”

When graduation approached and Alexander admitted he “didn’t really have a clue” about his future, he said Swackhamer made a radical suggestion: perhaps he could consider a career in acting. She arranged an internship at Main Street Theater in Rice Village.

Houston’s theater scene proved formative for Alexander, who said the city is “such a good place to start your career, and honestly, to have a career.” 

After graduating in 2010, Alexander told his parents that he was moving to New York to become an actor. By summer, he was living on a family friend’s farm in upstate New York, training and auditioning until he could afford to sublet in the city.

“I was just crazy,” he said. “I don’t know if I would do that today.”

Alexander’s athletic training had unknowingly conditioned him for a career in acting. The collaborative skills of communication, team building and listening to others on stage translated directly from the court, he said. Both, he realized, were all about ensembles.

“The mindset of the two are connected,” Alexander said. “I do repetitions. I work and I hound and I hound as much as I can, and then that kind of frees me up in the moment of an audition or being on stage … That’s what was instilled in me in my childhood and also when I was playing ball at Rice.”

Theater, however, introduced a psychological challenge that sports never had: the mystery of rejection.

“In sports, you play your game, and you win or you lose,” Alexander said. “If you lose, you can go back and there’s something to work toward, a goal that you can try to prove. But in acting, when you get a ‘no,’ you just don’t know why … The wins and losses are not as concrete. It’s an industry where you just have to have faith in yourself a lot.”

Like being an athlete, performing in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” demands constant physical maintenance, Alexander said. The production requires actors to execute stage combat, precise lifts and rapid scene transitions that take a toll on the body.

“Because you’re doing a specific lift at a specific time, there’s a constant repetition of, for example, a shoulder being overused,” Alexander said. “You have these random injuries that you have to protect, and the hardest thing is that when you go back into a show after an injury, you’re doing the exact thing that got you hurt every day.”

Getting the role tested Alexander’s resilience. His first audition cycle stretched across six or seven callbacks, he said, including movement calls that challenged his lack of formal dance training, Alexander said. At the final callback, he was cut.

When auditions reopened after the pandemic, Alexander returned to face the same creative team and the same demanding process. This time, he made it.

“I was told ‘no’ once for this show,” Alexander said. “It was a fun process, but it was a long process.”

Since joining the production, Alexander has performed in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago in addition to Broadway. One encounter stuck with him, he said: at the stage door after a show, a Black high school senior approached Alexander while he was signing playbills. 

The student had read Alexander’s program biography and shared that he planned to major in English literature while pursuing acting — the same path Alexander took at Rice.

“I got to tell him about how much I thought the major influenced my life, my knowledge and my skills,” Alexander said. “You forget how your own story can affect people, how the story that you’re presenting can affect and inspire people.”

This storytelling impulse drives Alexander’s writing, which he describes as “a lot of realism” focused on “young adulthood and trying to figure out who you are.” His undergraduate years in Houston provide frequent inspiration.

“It was a time of so many different things,” Alexander said. “It was basketball, it was the arts, it was dating, it was sexuality … I go back there because I think it was such a catalyst to who I became.”

His 2019 play titled “To an Athlete Dying Young” — named a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference — borrows its name from an A.E. Housman poem he read in an English class at Rice.

“I remember reading that poem while I was playing basketball and knowing that my career was going to come to an end very soon,” Alexander said. “I knew that’s where the title would come from … it’s kind of very full circle.”

In theater, as on the court, preparation is everything. For aspiring artists, Alexander’s advice is uncompromising.

“You should really, really love it,” Alexander said. “And you should love the creation of it and the practice of it more than the success of it … If you love it … then I say go for it,” he continued. “But just make sure you love it. Because it will be all you have, and it will be all you have without the accolades, without the money. There will be times when all you can go back to is the art form that you love, and you’re in the practice room working on your violin. That’ll be all you have.”

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