NEW YORK – American actors Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal will star in a Broadway production of Othello in 2025, setting up what is sure to be one of the hottest tickets of the 2024-25 theatre season.

American director Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for directing a revival of A Raisin In The Sun that starred Washington, will direct the production – the 22nd Broadway staging of Othello since 1751, according to the Internet Broadway Database.

Leon also directed Washington’s Tony-winning performance in a 2010 production of Fences.

Washington, an enormously successful film actor with two Academy Awards for Glory (1989) and Training Day (2001), has starred in five Broadway plays, most recently a 2018 revival of The Iceman Cometh.

Gyllenhaal, best known for his film career with movies such as Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Nightcrawler (2014), has starred in three Broadway shows, most recently a 2019 monologue called A Life, which was paired with Sea Wall for an evening of one-acts.

In Othello, one of William Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Washington, 69, will play the title character, a general driven mad by jealousy.

Gyllenhaal, 43, will play Iago, the story’s villain, who persuades Othello to question his wife’s fidelity.

The role of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, has not been cast.

The revival will be produced by Brian Anthony Moreland and the show is scheduled to open in spring 2025 at an unspecified Shubert Theatre.

The last Broadway production of Othello was in 1982, and starred American actor James Earl Jones as Othello and the late Canadian actor Christopher Plummer as Iago. NYTIMES