Chris D’Angelo was in rehearsal when he got the call he’d been hoping to receive for over 20 years. “I was in rehearsal for Emma at St. Mark’s Players, and my phone rang with an unknown number,” says D’Angelo, a content manager for an e-learning platform by day and a community theater actor and director by night. Assuming the unknown call to be spam, D’Angelo didn’t answer — and then he saw the word “Jeopardy” pop up in the voicemail transcript.
“So I’m standing in an Episcopalian church, and I start swearing, ‘Oh my God!’ and had to step out and call [the producer] back,” laughs D’Angelo. “She actually offered me a date that was in the run of Emma, between the first and second weekend. I had to say, I really can’t fly to LA and then fly back and do the show, but of course I want to do this!”
Jeopardy!’s producers ultimately accommodated D’Angelo’s request to finish his run as Mr. Knightly in St. Mark’s production of Emma, and he flew out to Los Angeles the day after Emma closed to begin recording for the iconic quiz show.
For D’Angelo, being invited on Jeopardy! was a decades-long dream in the making. “I’ve been trying to get on Jeopardy! since 2005,” he shared in a recent video interview with DC Theater Arts. “I took the test the first time right after I graduated from college, and I was invited to an in-person audition back then.” (Jeopardy! has since moved its audition process online.)
D’Angelo describes his early experiences of auditioning for Jeopardy! as similar to “a cattle call audition in the theater where you go in, you do your thing, and then you just hope that someone’s going to come out and say, ‘All right, you can stay!’” Unlike in the theater, however, those who successfully pass through the Jeopardy! audition process are placed in the contestant pool, where they might be called at any time within the next year and a half — or not. Contestants not called up from the pool after that time start the testing and audition process all over again, something D’Angelo did at least 10 times: “I spent most of my adult life — pretty much all of it — hoping that Jeopardy! would call me!”
While hoping for that call, D’Angelo (a history and theater major) considered pursuing a career in professional theater, but decided to go into education, teaching history in Philadelphia, Miami, and the DC area before becoming an educational content manager. From an early age (he fondly remembers performing in a community theater production of Carousel with his mother at age 8), community theater has been a constant throughline for D’Angelo wherever he has lived.
Since moving to the DC area five years ago, D’Angelo has performed with local community theaters, including City of Fairfax Theatre Company, The Arlington Players, NOVA Nightsky Theater (where he made his local directorial debut with Fool for Love in 2025), and St. Mark’s Players. So it’s fitting that he was at rehearsal when he finally got the call from Jeopardy!
Years of training as an actor have paid off for D’Angelo during his time on the quiz show. “Just like learning your lines, you have all this information in your head, and you have to get to it in the right time, at the right place, in the right way based on what someone else does,” he reflects. “Plenty of clues up there; if you asked me straight up, ‘What is this thing?’ I might not be able to get it, but there’s information in how they write the clue that then unlocks a different piece of information in your head.”
Sometimes D’Angelo’s theater experience helped him unlock these pieces of information in surprising ways. He admitted the only reason he correctly identified a quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses in a “Name That Author” category during his second game was that he’d recited that same Joyce passage years ago in an audition for Paula Vogel’s Hot ’N’ Throbbing.
For D’Angelo, a welcome surprise about Jeopardy! was how much being in the studio felt like being on stage: “You’re playing a game, the game board’s off to your right, and the cameras are off to your left. You can’t see them. So what you’re feeling is 120 people in the audience watching you, and then maybe 40 crew. You’ve got this energy flow from the audience just like you do on stage. I think that [theater] was the best thing I could do to prepare to be on Jeopardy!, because after 30 years of being on stage, I didn’t get overawed by being in front of people. If I thought about the millions of people who were going to be watching, I might have been, but if I could keep it in the room, it’s really helpful.”
Millions of people have now watched D’Angelo’s run on Jeopardy!. An eight-game winner and counting as of the show’s last air date (May 29), he has earned a spot in the show’s next Tournament of Champions. While Jeopardy! is one of the longest-running and most-watched syndicated shows in the country, D’Angelo says that his experience on the show reminded him of community theater in heartwarming ways.
“What really surprised me was the incredibly nice welcoming community vibe of the place,” he recalls, “both the people who work there and the people who are on the show. Yes, you want to win, [but] what really surprised me was that it wasn’t cutthroat competition.” Much like a theatrical cast, D’Angelo’s contestant group bonded over lunch between filming games, and still keep in touch via group chat.
As for the cast members of St. Mark’s Emma, who were present when D’Angelo got the call from Jeopardy! back at rehearsal in February? They joined D’Angelo and his wife, Ashley, for a watch party at their favorite local pub trivia spot when his first episode aired — a fitting culmination of a lifelong journey to the Jeopardy! stage that has intersected with community and with theater at every step of the way.
