Chris D’Angelo was in rehearsal when he received the decision he’d been hoping to obtain for over 20 years. “I used to be in rehearsal for Emma at St. Mark’s Gamers, and my telephone rang with an unknown quantity,” says D’Angelo, a content material supervisor for an e-learning platform by day and a neighborhood theater actor and director by night time. Assuming the unknown name to be spam, D’Angelo didn’t reply — after which he noticed the phrase “Jeopardy” pop up within the voicemail transcript.
“So I’m standing in an Episcopalian church, and I begin swearing, ‘Oh my God!’ and needed to step out and name [the producer] again,” laughs D’Angelo. “She truly supplied me a date that was within the run of Emma, between the primary and second weekend. I needed to say, I actually can’t fly to LA after which fly again and do the present, however in fact I wish to do that!”
Jeopardy!’s producers finally accommodated D’Angelo’s request to complete his run as Mr. Knightly in St. Mark’s manufacturing of Emma, and he flew out to Los Angeles the day after Emma closed to start recording for the enduring quiz present.
For D’Angelo, being invited on Jeopardy! was a decades-long dream within the making. “I’ve been attempting to get on Jeopardy! since 2005,” he shared in a latest video interview with DC Theater Arts. “I took the take a look at the primary time proper after I graduated from school, and I used to be invited to an in-person audition again then.” (Jeopardy! has since moved its audition course of on-line.)
D’Angelo describes his early experiences of auditioning for Jeopardy! as much like “a cattle name audition within the theater the place you go in, you do your factor, and then you definitely simply hope that somebody’s going to come back out and say, ‘All proper, you may keep!’” In contrast to within the theater, nevertheless, those that efficiently cross by means of the Jeopardy! audition course of are positioned within the contestant pool, the place they is likely to be known as at any time throughout the subsequent 12 months and a half — or not. Contestants not known as up from the pool after that point begin the testing and audition course of once more, one thing D’Angelo did no less than 10 instances: “I spent most of my grownup life — just about all of it — hoping that Jeopardy! would name me!”
Whereas hoping for that decision, D’Angelo (a historical past and theater main) thought of pursuing a profession in skilled theater, however determined to enter schooling, educating historical past in Philadelphia, Miami, and the DC space earlier than turning into an academic content material supervisor. From an early age (he fondly remembers performing in a neighborhood theater manufacturing of Carousel together with his mom at age 8), neighborhood theater has been a relentless throughline for D’Angelo wherever he has lived.
Since shifting to the DC space 5 years in the past, D’Angelo has carried out with local people theaters, together with Metropolis of Fairfax Theatre Firm, The Arlington Gamers, NOVA Nightsky Theater (the place he made his native directorial debut with Idiot for Love in 2025), and St. Mark’s Gamers. So it’s becoming that he was at rehearsal when he lastly received the decision from Jeopardy!
Years of coaching as an actor have paid off for D’Angelo throughout his time on the quiz present. “Identical to studying your traces, you may have all this data in your head, and it’s a must to get to it in the precise time, on the proper place, in the precise method based mostly on what another person does,” he displays. “Loads of clues up there; should you requested me straight up, ‘What is that this factor?’ I may not be capable of get it, however there’s data in how they write the clue that then unlocks a distinct piece of knowledge in your head.”
Typically D’Angelo’s theater expertise helped him unlock these items of knowledge in stunning methods. He admitted the one cause he appropriately recognized a quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses in a “Title That Writer” class throughout his second recreation was that he’d recited that very same Joyce passage years in the past in an audition for Paula Vogel’s Scorching ’N’ Throbbing.
For D’Angelo, a welcome shock about Jeopardy! was how a lot being within the studio felt like being on stage: “You’re enjoying a recreation, the sport board’s off to your proper, and the cameras are off to your left. You may’t see them. So what you’re feeling is 120 folks within the viewers watching you, after which possibly 40 crew. You’ve received this vitality movement from the viewers similar to you do on stage. I feel that [theater] was the perfect factor I might do to organize to be on Jeopardy!, as a result of after 30 years of being on stage, I didn’t get overawed by being in entrance of individuals. If I assumed in regards to the hundreds of thousands of people that have been going to be watching, I may need been, but when I might maintain it within the room, it’s actually useful.”
Tens of millions of individuals have now watched D’Angelo’s run on Jeopardy!. An eight-game winner and counting as of the present’s final air date (Might 29), he has earned a spot within the present’s subsequent Event of Champions. Whereas Jeopardy! is without doubt one of the longest-running and most-watched syndicated exhibits within the nation, D’Angelo says that his expertise on the present reminded him of neighborhood theater in heartwarming methods.
“What actually stunned me was the extremely good welcoming neighborhood vibe of the place,” he recollects, “each the individuals who work there and the people who find themselves on the present. Sure, you wish to win, [but] what actually stunned me was that it wasn’t cutthroat competitors.” Very similar to a theatrical forged, D’Angelo’s contestant group bonded over lunch between filming video games, and nonetheless be in contact through group chat.
As for the forged members of St. Mark’s Emma, who have been current when D’Angelo received the decision from Jeopardy! again at rehearsal in February? They joined D’Angelo and his spouse, Ashley, for a watch get together at their favourite native pub trivia spot when his first episode aired — a becoming end result of a lifelong journey to the Jeopardy! stage that has intersected with neighborhood and with theater at each step of the way in which.
