Tony-winning producer Jordan Roth jumps to acting in ‘The Shards’

“As a young person I was an actor and I always intended to be an actor in my life professionally,” Roth says. “That’s what I trained in and what I was doing right after college. And then I found a show that I wanted to produce. I was just sort of making it happen.”

“Hair,” “Clybourne Park,” “Kinky Boots,” “Angels in America,” “Hadestown,” “Moulin Rouge” and “Company” made him a force on Broadway and a regular on red carpets and openings. Forays into fashion and performance art followed. And then Roth got a call from fellow producer Ryan Murphy.

“I wrote you a part,” Murphy said in a message on Instagram. “Call me.”

The role was Steven, an all-knowing force in the world of 1980s Hollywood. Found in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, “The Shards,” he’s the one character who seems prominent everywhere.

Co-starring Kaia Gerber, Homer Gere and other young stars (and offspring of the rich and famous), “The Shards” is a time capsule of the ‘80s.

“All of the cast, regardless of age, came with a sense of the ‘80s because we all experienced it, whether we lived through it or not,” Roth says. “The ‘80s have become and continue to be really indelible in terms of music, fashion, celebrity, storytelling and films.”

Murphy told him Steven was likely a trendsetter at a time when the internet didn’t exist. “He said he imagines that Steven is looking at the runways of Paris, the music scene in London. It was so easy to find the references. He was a real student of esthetic culture in Ryan’s mind.”

To define the parameters, Roth printed out every runway show from 1981, did a deep dive on the New Romantics and the New Wave and, in the process, happened upon David Sylvian, lead singer of the band Japan.

“He had that hair,” he says of the coiffed wave Steven wears. “And so the hair became the beginning of Steven.” Yves St. Laurent’s silhouette added to the look — “that great power shoulder and that nipped waist.”

The character’s voice came from the scripts, Roth says. “There was something about how he was written in those early episodes that made me want to slow him down and lower his pitch. He talks with his lips and his tongue, so you have to listen. Steven is a human with not a lot of power but very smart at finding ways to collect power. Forcing the lean-in and forcing his own timetable is a way of getting power in a world where he has very little.”

In play, Roth and the other actors enjoyed drinking in the atmosphere and, essentially, living in the ‘80s. “Evan Rachel Wood, Graham Campbell and I were the designated singers of the cast and we were constantly singing,” he says. “Evan and I were texting the other day about casting ‘Shard’s’ characters as musical theater characters. Not surprisingly, Steven was the witch from ‘Into the Woods.’”

While Roth is closer in age to their parents, he got to know Gerber and Gere first and came to know Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere through them. “Kaia and Homer have become dear friends,” he says. “This is the most extraordinary group of humans — we have ‘puppy piled’ on each other through the making of this show and now through the sharing of the show and it’s been really extraordinary.”

One and done? “Ryan Murphy has created a monster,” Roth says. “I’m never leaving.

“I realized what I was doing on the show was taking everything I know from my theater life, everything I know from my fashion life and everything I know from my performance art life and bringing it to bear in the service of this character in this story. I’m an ‘and’ person, not an ‘or’ person. Everything we do informs everything else we do. We learn from it. We grow from it … and that’s what’s happening now.”

Leave Broadway for Hollywood. No, Roth says, “I’m not leaving, just adding.”