When Samantha Pauly was growing up in Iowa, her parents, who weren’t artistic or into theater, would take her to New York City on vacation. But they never went to a Broadway show.

It wasn’t until 2007, during a field trip her senior year of high school, when she got to experience her first two Broadway shows — The Drowsy Chaperone and Wicked — and it changed the entire trajectory of what she wanted to do after graduation.

At the time, she wasn’t even planning on going to college. “I didn’t really have a life plan because I didn’t feel like I was really good at anything,” she tells Broadway Direct on video chat.

Julia Murney’s Elphaba made her rethink everything.

“Her voice is just so unique and so powerful. I had never heard anyone sing like that,” Pauly recalls. “I had never seen anything on that scale before. I remember watching ‘Defying Gravity’ and thinking, ‘If this is what it can be, I want to do that.’”

Nearly two decades later, Pauly is starring as Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby alongside Jeremy Jordan (Jay Gatsby) and Eva Noblezada (Daisy Buchanan) at the Broadway Theatre, opening April 25. It marks her second Broadway show, following her role as Broadway’s original Katherine Howard in SIX.

The story of Gatsby is lifted from the pages of the literary classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald and transformed into a musical full of the glitz and glamour of the roaring 1920s. Jordan Baker, Daisy’s best friend, is an unmarried professional golfer — a sport that was mainly played by men — and is infused with signs of early feminism. “Independent” is how Pauly describes her version of Baker, who doesn’t need to be in a relationship to be happy.

“I feel like I identify with a lot of things about her. I don’t know if I am independent all the time, but she inspires me to be more independent and understand that I am fully capable of doing things and surviving on my own,” Pauly says, noting she also has taken a little bit of the “badass” attitude she needed for SIX and channeled it into Baker. “Maybe that’s another thing that [Baker’s] teaching me as a character because in life I am not like that. I’m like, ‘Please don’t look at me.’”

It might be surprising that as an actress who performs in front of a live audience, Pauly is actually a bit shy in social settings when she doesn’t know anyone. Baker’s most famous line from the book, also in the stage adaptation, resonates even more these days. “‘I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.’ In high school, you read something like that and don’t know what that means. Rereading it again, I’m like, ‘Oh, I know exactly what she’s talking about.’”

On Broadway, Pauly also has a big six-and-a-half-minute production number called “New Money,” added to the show that wasn’t in the world premiere at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, last fall. It includes multiple dance breaks. To achieve the stamina needed for the song, Pauly says she’s honing in on the same energy she needed in SIX during the eight-and-a-half-minute-long “All You Want to Do.”

“I’m trying to recall how I made it through that song eight times a week and still sounded good. So I’m building all of that back up again,” Pauly says.

Pauly was living in Chicago when she booked the U.S. premiere of SIX. She had just wrapped up a brief stint in the Bat Out of Hell tour that abruptly canceled and wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue in musical theater. It wasn’t making her happy and she considered working at a greyhound rescue. “I was so depressed,” she says. But she agreed to perform in a regional production of Footloose. Her voice teacher and musical director of SIX, Roberta Duchak, lived in Chicago and asked her to audition for SIX, but Pauly said no four times.

“‘I think this is your show, and I think it’s gonna go to Broadway,’” Pauly recalls what Duchak said to her. Begrudgingly, she put an audition on tape and booked the show in 2019.

When SIX transferred to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre (later renamed the Lena Horne Theatre) on Broadway in February 2020, Pauly moved to New York too. She stayed with the show through the shutdown, including a canceled opening night and subsequent September 2021 reopening, until 2022.

That same year, as fate would have it, she met Wicked’s Julia Murney at an event. She recalls Murney reached across the table, grabbed her hands, and said, “I’m so happy. We’re finally here together.” Trying not to be a fangirl later that night, Pauly found the courage to say, “You’re the reason I am doing this.”

As Pauly readies for the opening night of Gatsby, she thinks back to how this all started with a trip to New York City to see a Broadway show.

“Everything about my life, career-wise, is so far beyond the scope of anything I ever thought I would do,” she adds.