Jon Jon Briones Has Entered His Next Act

At 60, Jon Jon Briones is still auditioning for his next gig. That might be the most staggering revelation about a career that has already taken him from a church community in Manila to the West End, Broadway, Ryan Murphy’s television universe, and a new generation of Hollywood productions. The résumé reads like a triumphant final chapter, but Briones speaks like a man who is still writing the beginning.

Right now, he is juggling worlds: filming the third season of Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender as the swordmaster Piandao and appearing in Ryan Murphy’s latest television drama, The Beauty. It is the latest peak in a chameleon-like run across screens big and small, spanning Ratched, Class of ’09, The Assassination of Gianni Versace (where he played the father of another FilipinoFilipinoThe national language of the Philippines, widely used for communication, education, media, and culture.Go to Filipino Glossary, GQ Philippines cover star Darren Criss), American Horror Story, Star Trek: Picard, and Trese.

Yet, corner the veteran actor to talk about his legacy, and you will find a man trapped in a state of permanent, beautiful disbelief. “Every time I step on set, even now, and then I see the actors that they have, I go, can you believe this?” he says, his voice softening. “Why am I here?”

This isn’t performative modesty. Briones has been in the industry for nearly four decades. He made his professional debut as part of the ensemble in the original 1989 London production of Miss Saigon while still an engineering student in the Philippines. He would inhabit that monumental show for chunks of his life, ultimately playing the Engineer in the celebrated 2014 West End revival and its subsequent 2017 Broadway transfer.

You would think decades of headlining marquee lights would cure a person of imposter syndrome, but Briones smiles at the notion. “It never ends,” he says.

Perhaps that is because his trajectory was never a calculated blueprint. He left the Philippines without a map, fueled only by an open door and curiosity. Growing up, Briones lived within the walls of Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City, studying, singing, and absorbing a traditional Catholic worldview that emphasized listening, obeying, and simply being thankful. When Miss Saigon arrived, he hadn’t viewed it as a tactical career chess move.

“I was just happy,” he says. “I was just thankful that I was given that opportunity to do a huge, well, the biggest musical at that time.” The sheer scale of it felt surreal. He had grown up in General Lim, a working-class neighborhood in Manila, and was suddenly dropped into the West End spotlight. “I just felt like this is luck and I won the lottery,” he says. There is something very FilipinoFilipinoThe national language of the Philippines, widely used for communication, education, media, and culture.Go to Filipino Glossary about the gratitude in that sentence, but Briones’ story becomes more complicated when the luck wears off.

For decades, the pipeline for Asian actors in the West was notoriously microscopic. Once you found a niche that worked, the industry tried to lock you in it forever. For Briones, Miss Saigon became both a golden key and a gilded cage—a loop he kept repeating. Rather than despairing, he used repetition as a weapon. “Doing it over and over again is like school,” he says. “It’s like acting school. You get better.”

That stubborn persistence engineered the great irony of his career. When Cameron Mackintosh mounted the 2014 West End revival, the creative team wasn’t looking backwards. Briones had to fight just to get into the room. He auditioned anyway, blew the doors off the production, and permanently altered his life’s path.

Eventually, this performance as the Engineer caught the attention of super producer Ryan Murphy, helping propel him toward roles in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, American Horror Story, and eventually Ratched, where he played Dr. Richard Hanover. These breakthroughs came late by Hollywood standards. “I got my big break when I was 51,” he says.

In an industry that likes to make age sound like a deadline, Briones’ career is a rebuttal. He did not become less interesting as he got older; he became more specific, having accumulated more years, more disappointments, more instincts, more things to draw from.

This maturity also revolutionized how he viewed his own identity in an industry that originally demanded assimilation. “When I started acting in America, I was always told, ‘You need to lose that accent.’” He tried, but the cadence of home remained. Eventually, his relationship to it changed entirely.

The actor describes a gradual realization that the things he had once tried to minimize were precisely the things that distinguished him. He had spent years wondering how other actors might approach a role, only to reach the more liberating conclusion that the reason he had been cast was that he could bring something they couldn’t, and that became increasingly visible in his work. 

On Broadway, he has spoken Tagalog onstage. His daughter, actress Isa Briones, later joined him in Hadestown, where the two shared a stage while bringing elements of their FilipinoFilipinoThe national language of the Philippines, widely used for communication, education, media, and culture.Go to Filipino Glossary identity into the production.

For Briones, hearing Filipinos respond to those moments has been its own kind of recognition. “When I read comments from FilipinoFilipinoThe national language of the Philippines, widely used for communication, education, media, and culture.Go to Filipino Glossary Americans like, ‘Oh, my God, a Filipino in this show,’ I’m so proud,” he says. “I wanted to make it normal. Make our sound normal. Because we are here, Filipinos are here.”

He does not speak about representation as a form of ceremonial gesture; he genuinely wants presence to become ordinary. An accent should not need to be erased, and Tagalog on a Broadway stage should not be a novelty forever.

Maybe that is also why his ambitions now feel so expansive; having spent decades proving himself, he can finally focus on what comes next. And there is still plenty he wants to do. He wants another Broadway show, he wants to make a Filipino movie, and he wants to work with Filipino filmmakers. “I’m hungry for that because it’s going back to your roots. That’s telling your story,” he says.

That desire has become more pronounced after decades away from home. Distance, he explains, made the country feel more vivid. His children, especially Isa, helped reconnect him to the parts of his identity he had put aside while navigating an industry that encouraged him to assimilate. There is another layer to the story, as both of his children followed him into acting, and Briones admits it was frightening.

He and his wife knew exactly what they were handing their kids. They had seen the glamour of the business, but they had also seen the periods when there was no work, when money was tight, when an audition became disproportionately important because the family needed the job. His children grew up around those realities and, for a while, questioned whether they wanted any part of them. Eventually, they chose acting anyway. Briones and his wife joke about one particular advantage of having talented children: “Thank God they’re talented, we don’t have to lie to them.”

The humor is affectionate, but it reveals a family that has thoroughly scrubbed the fantasy out of showbiz. Briones knows exactly what his children are inheriting because he still remembers the exact price of admission.

The hardest sacrifice he had to make came at the beginning of his story. When he was offered Miss Saigon, he was close to finishing his engineering degree. He knew what his father expected from him: to help provide stability for a family that had worked hard and had not had much of it. Instead, Briones went to his father’s room and told him that he would not be finishing engineering. Instead, he was going to London to become an actor.

“I knew he was hurt,” Briones says. “I knew the weight of the world suddenly became heavier for him again.” Even now, decades later, he still wonders whether the decision was selfish.

That question may explain something about the actor he became. Briones spent much of his early life trying to be useful, to family, to productions, and to the opportunities he was given. The instinct to be grateful is so deeply rooted that he sometimes sounds almost apologetic for wanting more. But one of the clearest lessons of his career is that wanting more was never the problem; the real task was learning not to let the pressure consume him.

He remembers one particularly bad audition, when the accumulated anxiety finally broke through. He was crying, yelling at God, asking whether he should leave the profession, and then, almost as quickly, he reconsidered.

“No, no, I can’t,” he remembers thinking. “Please, please don’t take this away from me.” It was, he says, a check from the universe: Is this what you really want?

And that answer was yes, so he stayed. 

That may be the most useful way to understand Briones now. Not as an actor who finally made it, because that makes the story sound finished. He is someone who kept going long enough to become a different actor several times over. The teenager who sang in a church, the engineering student who took an improbable audition, the veteran who returned to Miss Saigon again and again, and the Broadway father performing with his daughter. Here he is, still auditioning, still doubting, and still learning.

He has one piece of advice for younger actors that sounds almost like a summary of his own career: control what you can control, work on your craft, and love what you do. Because rejection, he says, is not an interruption to the job; it is the job. “You can’t get better if you don’t fail.”

Then there is the part he wants his children to remember, which is to have fun. “Do the work. Know your stuff. Tell yourself you’re good. Then forget about it and move to the next thing.”

That elusive “next thing” still possesses a magnetic gravity for him. When he maps out the next twenty years, he speaks with the same wild wonder that carried him off the plane in London four decades ago. “I want to soak it all in and have so much fun,” he says.

For a man who spent a lifetime being told—both in hushed industry assumptions and loud rejections—exactly what a person with his face and his accent was allowed to achieve, there is something radical and revolutionary about that joy. Jon Jon Briones is no longer begging for a seat at the table; he is deciding what to build next.

SHOOT CREDITS:

Story by GABRIEL YAP. Photographs by RYAN KEVIN. Styling by MARK-PAUL BARRO. Photographer’s Assistant: MICHAEL BLANK. Photo Retoucher: MEGUMI SHIMIZU. Executive Producer: JESSE GUZMÀN. Shoot Location: KNORTS KNIT DENIM STUDIO.