Claybourne Elder is best known for his works on television and Broadway. Aside from acting, he is also a singer and writer.
Claybourne was born on April 21, 1982 in Springville, Utah. He is the youngest of eight siblings, and his mother is a school teacher while his father is a carpenter. He played the violin in the school orchestra at an early age, and he studied acting at the Moscow Klasse Centre in Russia.
He then attended Brigham Young University and the University of Utah, where he earned a degree in dramaturgy and directing. In 2007, a 23-year-old Claybourne was an aspiring actor who visited New York City.
While in the standing-room section of the Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a stranger, who noted his enthusiasm for theater, approached and gave him $200. The stranger told him to spend it on a ticket to a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street the next night, which he did.
The now 41-year-old actor considered the stranger’s kindness to be one of the factors that helped him decide to move to New York and pursue a career in acting. Fast forward to 2022 when Claybourne starred in a different Sondheim revival, Company, where he worked alongside Patti LuPone.
Not to mention, the actress happens to be one of the cast in the Sweeney Todd production that Claybourne watched back when he was just an aspiring actor. Furthermore, the actor was eventually reunited with Mark Howell, the stranger who gave him money back in 2007.
Claybourne decided to pay it forward by buying other strangers tickets to his Broadway show Company. Moreover, the actor has been married to theater director Eric Rosen since 2012, and they have a son together through surrogacy.
In a 2020 interview with Broadway World, Claybourne, who is openly gay, shared about his experience being a father, expressing:
“I had always hoped I would get to be a dad but because I’m gay I thought that might never be possible. It’s almost strange to think that 10 years ago I wouldn’t even have a legal marriage. There are so many ways to make a family, but as a gay man there are some unique challenges that are difficult and often times expensive. Eric and I decided that for our wedding we wouldn’t register for gifts, we would register for a baby. We set up a fund where people could donate towards our surrogacy. It took that and some lucky residual checks, but now we have an amazing son. People say it a lot, but having a child really focuses your priorities.”
And now that we’ve gotten to know this talented hottie a bit better, let’s move on to admiring some of his sexy pics, shall we?
Sources: en.wikipedia.org, broadwayworld.com
Can’t wait to see him this summer as Gaston at The Muny. He was amazing in Company!
It would seem the part of Gaston was written for him.
To me he looks younger than 41, must be the gay genes at work.