Aya Cash’s Broadway Routine Is Part Cardio, Part Bravo Binges

Last year, Aya Cash kicked off her run in the West End production of Giant just a couple of weeks after the acclaimed show won three Olivier Awards, including Best New Play. Such accolades would be a tough act for anyone to step into — let alone if you only had a week to rehearse before making your debut.

“I was just terrified,” says Cash, 43. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to mess this up. It’s done so well. Everyone loves it. And now I’m coming in, and I can be the thing that makes the wheels come off.’”

To say she didn’t “mess it up” is an understatement: Giant opened on Broadway in March to glowing reviews and will almost certainly rake in Tony Award nominations next month. The play stars John Lithgow, who won the 2025 Olivier for Best Actor in a Play, as children’s author Roald Dahl and explores the real-life fallout of a book review he wrote of God Cried, which covered the 1982 Lebanon War. Dahl’s review was widely deemed antisemitic, and — despite the backlash — he reiterated his beliefs in an interview with the New Statesman (both of which are quoted in the play).

Cash, whose screen credits include the FX/FXX series You’re the Worst and Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys, plays Jessie Stone, a rep from Dahl’s American publisher trying to do damage control with the tough task of extracting an apology. “I read the play and I couldn’t breathe afterward,” she says. “Absolutely terrifying. It’s the conversations that nobody seemed able to have these days.”

On the show’s evolving relevance:

It’s been timely for two and a half years, and different each time. I think about different things this year than I did last year doing the play, because the news changes — and that is fascinating. [Mark Rosenblatt] started writing this play six years ago, or something like that, and it’s just gotten more and more timely as the conversation in the Middle East has gotten more and more intense worldwide. In a way, it feels like an invitation to talk about things that everyone’s afraid to talk about, and I think that invitation is really good. I hear a lot that people at intermission turn to each other and just start talking about the themes, and that feels like what you want art to do.

On re-evaluating artists and their legacies:

It’s so individual, and I can’t tell anyone else how they’re supposed to feel about it. I have a hard time when the art is about the thing that the artist has been taken down for.

Dahl feels different to me just because my experience of the art is very separate from the artist. And I think it’s good to have the information and the context so you can make those decisions about where you want to put your money and what you want to support in that way. For me, that art meant so much to me as a kid, and that doesn’t change. It’s like what Jessie says in the show: “I don’t know if everything you are, the books are too.”

On pre-show exercise:

I like to walk a lot, so sometimes, I walk all the way to the theater. The most actor-y thing I do before my entrance is run the stairs of the theater up and down for a good five minutes so that I show up a little out of breath, a little out of sorts — to be able to walk onstage with the right energy of somebody who’s running late. The cast also says hello before the show — we’ll sit onstage and do a little bit of warm-up and a little bit of gossip.

On backstage squats:

Right when the lights go down — because Rachael [Stirling] and I are not onstage in the very first bit — we do 20 squats and 25 tricep dips. We did that in the West End, and we do that here. It’s a nice moment to just be with her and get a little energy for the show. I would feel weird if I didn’t do those things.

On post-show Bravo binges:

It’s very hard to come down after the show. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I turn on quality reality television. I love Bravo — Summer House right now, oh, my God! I mean, I’m not the first person to say this, but it’s sports. It’s investing deeply and feeling like things are high stakes when they’re very low.

On her day-off rituals:

I try to see my husband on my day off — he’s put in that request. We’ve been together almost 21 years, and we both love food. So I like to sleep in and take the dog for a walk, go for a real leisurely breakfast, and wander around — pop into a thrift store, get a coffee, see some friends. Some of our tops right now are St. Jardim and a place called Agi’s Counter — those are my two favorite breakfasts in the city right now. They’re very different places — one’s in deep Brooklyn, one’s in the West Village. I’ll travel wherever. St. Jardim just feels like not-bougie West Village. The people who work there are so nice, and there’s a chicken and rice dish that is my favorite dish in the city at the moment.