Sorting Himself Out
From Rice to Broadway, actor and playwright Chadd Alexander has built a career around the power of belonging.
By Alice Levitt
For a long time, Chadd Alexander Wilson ’10 thought of himself as a card-carrying Slytherin baddie. But since 2022, when the Rice alumnus joined the Broadway cast of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in the role of the Sorting Hat, he’s had to accept his official, quiz-confirmed status as a Gryffindor. Playing the Sorting Hat means knowing the Sorting Hat is never wrong.
Alexander’s path from basketball player to Broadway actor and playwright has been anything but linear, but it has been shaped by the same search for community, discipline and transformation that first brought him to Rice.
Even before Alexander joined the wizarding world, he used Hogwarts to explain Rice’s residential college system to outsiders. “You live in the house, you’re there all four years, you compete in these random competitions. It’s Hogwarts, which is so funny,” says Alexander, a former Jonesian.
Alexander spent “a hot second” at New York University before returning to his hometown of Houston to enroll at Rice, seeking more of a sense of community in his college experience. He found it on the Rice basketball team, which he joined as a walk-on. He still keeps in touch with several of his teammates, who formed a tight-knit bond over their seasons together.
It was Alexander’s experience coming out to his teammates during his senior year that formed the backbone of his first play, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” one of two of his works to be named a semifinalist in the prestigious National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. “It was definitely a shift in energy,” he recalls. “I was supported, but it was kind of like a quiet support, if that makes sense. That was an interesting year, but it was also the year that, luckily, I found theater again.”
By “again,” Alexander is referring to his unexpected stint as a child actor. In an effort to keep him and his twin brother busy with sports and activities, Alexander’s parents had him try out for the children’s ensemble of the Broadway classic “Show Boat.” Despite knowing almost nothing about musical theater, Alexander landed a role and spent nearly a year touring with the show nationwide.
“The theater bug was always there. I just didn’t know what that was. I didn’t know what it would become,” he says.
Today, Alexander credits his time on the basketball court with helping him build the stamina and discipline required for the physical demands of creating onstage “magic” eight times a week. His pre-show mental process, too, mirrors the locker room rituals of relaxation he developed as a basketball player at Rice. Offstage, the former English major is also currently researching and writing a television pilot about the Mali Empire.
After five years of playing the Sorting Hat, Alexander knows he will eventually take his final curtain call. But he is in no rush. “I know this is a moment in my life I will never be able to duplicate. I’ve just been riding the wave, and it’s been really cool,” he says. “There’s something inside of people — they feel something when it has to do with Harry Potter. I have to bring people into this world, and I hope they’re along for the ride with me.”
From the Fall 2026 issue of Rice Magazine