Alex Newell

Alex Newell, whose inspirations range from Donna Summer and Chaka Khan to Beyoncé, first rose to prominence via his recurring portrayal of Wade “Unique” Adams on the Fox musical comedy Glee. The part came after the singer-actor placed second on The Glee Project, the Oxygen-network singing contest whose producers were sufficiently impressed to cast him. In his personal life identifying as a gender-nonconforming male, Newell embodied a transgender student on Glee, a gender-fluid character on Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, and has remained an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights through ongoing participation in related events. His solo recording debut, the 2016 Power EP, placed him on the dance charts, as did that year’s “Kill the Lights” and a 2019 featured appearance on DJ D-Sol’s “Rescue Me.”

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Newell first performed publicly at a state fair at age two. After losing his father to cancer when he was six, he was raised by his mother and pursued music and theater through school and church programs, singing in choirs at both. Still in high school, he submitted an audition tape for The Glee Project in 2011 and made his Glee debut on the third-season episode “Saturday Night Glee-ver” in April 2012. Although accepted that fall by Boston’s Berklee College of Music, he instead moved to Los Angeles upon being invited back for Glee’s fourth season. Film appearances soon followed, among them the 2013 comedy Geography Club and the short Platypus the Musical. Later that year he signed with Big Beat Records and began recording his debut EP.

His maiden single, a disco-charged cover of Sigma’s “Nobody to Love,” surfaced in 2014. Additional standalone tracks arrived, including a version of Robin S.’s “Show Me Love” with DJ Matvey Emerson and, for Christmas 2015, an R&B-ballad treatment of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Newell remained with Glee through its sixth season, during which he joined the 200-member Transpersons Choir for a performance of “I Know Where I’ve Been” from the musical Hairspray. A 2015 guest stint on Hulu’s Resident Advisors preceded the early-2016 release of his dance-pop EP Power, which reached the Top Five of Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart while he toured with fellow American Idol and Glee alumnus Adam Lambert. Later that year he topped the Dance Club Songs chart with “Kill the Lights,” a DJ Cassidy and Jess Glynne collaboration featuring Nile Rodgers.

Newell made his Broadway debut in late 2017, portraying Asaka in the Tony Award-winning revival of Once on This Island; the cast album earned him a Grammy nomination. The production closed in January 2019. Returning to the studio after a three-year absence, he issued the standalone single “As I Am” in mid-2019 and, months later, reached number four on the Dance Club Songs chart as a featured vocalist on DJ D-Sol’s cover of the R&B classic “Rescue Me.”

After a guest appearance on Empire, Newell rejoined television full-time as Mo, Zoey’s gender-fluid neighbor on the music-driven NBC series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, which premiered in January 2020. Big Beat followed one month later with the solo release “Boy, You Can Keep It.”