Pink Confetti, Backstreet Boys and Beatrice: Hayley Atwell Takes 'Much Ado' to Broadway

Hayley Atwell opens on Broadway next week as Beatrice in Jamie Lloyd's production of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," playing opposite Tom Hiddleston's Benedick at the Winter Garden Theater in New York.

The production, which swept London's West End last year, sets the comedy in a rain of pink confetti and a soundtrack running from Backstreet Boys to Beastie Boys. Great actors have been tackling the play since roughly 1599. Few have done it while inhaling confetti mid-monologue.

Atwell laid out her reading of the central couple in an interview with NPR's Scott Simon. "It's sort of the original rom-com," she said, "so it fulfills that formula of sort of miscommunication and cross wires and two people who are using their wit as a defense against potentially being hurt by the other." Both actors, like the characters, are in their 40s. "There's so much wit and humor to it, but there's so much sadness in them both," she said.

Why all the pink confetti?

This is Atwell's third collaboration with Lloyd, whose style has grown increasingly stripped back — actors in three-dimensional space, text first, visuals that don't have to be literal. Atwell said she signed on with two questions for the director: "Will there be any barn dancing, and how 'Hey Nonny Nonny!' is it?"

The confetti arrived on the first day of rehearsals. Her defense of it is precise: the confetti and music are "not a gimmick" but an immersive world of "serotonin, pop and fun" that stays rooted in clarity of text. The onstage costs are real. Atwell has inhaled enough confetti to lose lines and a jump into Hiddleston's arms; she slipped on stage two nights ago, and Hiddleston slipped in London. "I mean, we are really suffering," she said, laughing. "But we love the joy that it brings to audiences."

As for the club dancing: "I would say my club training was in the clubs."

How does Beatrice read in 2026?

Atwell rejects the "outspoken" label. "I see her as someone who is really lonely and really scared of admitting that to herself, let alone someone else," she said. The turning point is Hero's disgrace — a woman not believed. Beatrice wishes she were a man so she would "have power to protect her, to defend her, to put it to right," and demands Benedick "use the love he says he has for her to do something right with it."

The actress connects that 400-year-old plea to contemporary debates about allyship: not just women protecting themselves from bad guys, she said, but asking good men to look after women "and not just directly, but also by holding their friends accountable."

The production also weaponizes Hiddleston's Loki fandom — his six-pack earned a near-standing ovation, Simon noted — which Atwell folds into performance. "That's her also going, you're an idiot, and that's not love," she said. "Men are melted into curtsies, and valor becomes compliment."

Her closing argument is the show's thesis: "The pink confetti and the '90s music is not a distraction. It's almost a kind of radical act that joy can coexist and must coexist alongside the real horrors of the world and that joy is a serious thing."

Broadway audiences can test the theory — and the confetti's grip — when the production opens next week.