5 Questions with Bryson Battle: From the Blumey Awards to “The Voice” and What’s Next
Aug 27, 2025 / Blog
Picture this: You’re living in Boston, in the midst of your senior year in college studying musical theater and suddenly you’re whisked off to a production studio in Burbank, California.
You perform for TV audiences in the millions, compete with other extraordinary talents, and get feedback from celebrity coaches like this:
“You might have the greatest voice I have ever heard,” from 5-time Grammy AwardsⓇ winner Michael Buble, and "Everybody’s jaw is on the floor seeing what you can do with your voice," from EGOT winner John Legend.
Sounds like a dream? For Harrisburg, North Carolina native Bryson Battle, it’s just his latest year.
Battle, the 2021 Best Actor winner at the Blumey Awards (the Charlotte-area regional high school musical theater competition) and the national Jimmy Awards, recently finished an astounding run on NBC’s “The Voice.”
His debut song earned a coveted “four-chair turn” from all the celebrity coaches, and he dominated in competition week after week. He made it all the way to the live semi-final rounds in May. That month, he also graduated from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and booked the lead role in the brand new off-Broadway musical, “Saturday Church” - now in performances at the New York Theatre Workshop!
The show, based on the film of the same name, features music by pop star Sia and a cast including Tony Award winners J. Harrison Ghee (“Some Like It Hot”) and Joaquina Kalukango (“Paradise Square”).
Battle recently spoke to Blumenthal Arts’ Blog over Zoom from his family’s home in Harrisburg, where he was on break before heading back to New York City for rehearsals. He talked about his experience on “The Voice,” about his upcoming performance, and what his Blumey and Jimmy Awards experiences mean to him today.
Interview condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Blumenthal Arts’ Blog: What was it like performing for “The Voice” on stage with an audience, and on camera with all those amazing coaches?
Bryson Battle: It was such an out of body experience. Truthfully, it felt like a crash course in becoming a pop star [and] how to give one of the biggest live performances of all time: all of the moving pieces of the live audience, the live band, the lights, the cameras, all of those different things which I'm used to in theater but not to this scale.
It was so humbling just seeing how many people and how much work goes into creating those [episodes]. And, honestly, was truly one of the best experiences I could have asked for.
The celebrity coaches really heightened the stakes but also gave me a kind of firsthand experience of what that life is like.
When it came time for the trailers and the sneak peeks coming out, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that's me." It was just so exciting because this was stuff that I had never seen before either.
BAB: What were some of the lessons that you took away from working with your coach, John Legend?
Battle: One of them was trusting myself. I think my whole journey of “The Voice” and what I was working towards was just confidence.
John did a great job of reinforcing that I'm here for a reason, I keep making it past all of these different rounds because he believes in me. And him putting that trust in me gave me that confidence: trusting yourself not only as a performer but also as an artist, in terms of what you're attracted to musically and what your heart is telling you to do in this moment, as far as movement and choreography and things of that nature.
It's like you can trust that and you can lean into that.
BAB: How did you handle your nerves? Was it different from being in a musical?
Battle: It was, I think, because in a musical you have so much time to warm into things. With how [“The Voice”] is structured, you have a lot of downtime, sitting around and waiting and that honestly sucks for your nerves because you're just running things over and over again.
I always have to pee when I'm nervous and on a day that we were filming our performances, it would be like almost 8 to12 times, and that gives you a glimpse of how long we are just sitting backstage, waiting for our time to perform.
I learned that walking really helps, you can't just sit and then go to perform. You have to get your body moving and then also it's a huge mental factor because in theater, you have multiple songs you're doing. You're performing for almost two and a half hours straight and a lot of the other people who perform gigs are performing hour-long to two hour-long sets and we're like, “why are we so nervous over this one song?”
But I think getting yourself out of that mental block [is key], like, “Oh, I do this. I perform. This is kind of what I spend my entire life doing. This one song is not that hard.”
BAB: Tell me about “Saturday Church” and your role in it.
Battle: Oh my goodness, “Saturday Church” is such a blessing. It's a new musical based off of a film by Damon Cardasis. [The musical’s book is a collaboration between Cardasis and Pulitzer Prize winner/Bessemer City, NC native James Ijames].
I play Ulysses, this New York City kid who recently lost his father. He's living with his mom and his aunt and he's kind of battling internally with his queerness and where that falls in the church. I think that's an experience that a lot of young people and people in general can really relate to.
And in this chance encounter on a subway, he is introduced to the world of Saturday Church, which is a sanctuary for LGBTQ youth. So he's kind of wrestling between these two worlds and trying to just really find out who he is and where he fits in this world and [wondering] “is faith only for the holy?” and kind of answering that question.
I'm so excited for people to see it because this team is, one, incredibly stacked and magical and I'm just so grateful to be in the room for this, but also for this to come at this specific moment in my life is just such a huge blessing.
(Bryson Battle at rehearsals for Saturday Church)
BAB: Now that you're four years out from the Jimmy Awards and the Blumey Awards, do you still carry some of that experience with you? What does that mean to you at this point in your journey?
Battle: I will always carry my Blumey and Jimmy experiences with me because they were such transformative years for myself and also really kind of crystallized this idea of “you can do anything you want, if you put your mind to it.” It's also something that I learned so much from.
(Bryson Battle performing at the 2021 Blumey Awards at Belk Theater)
I really do cherish it as one of my biggest accomplishments in life even though I am four years removed from it. But I love, love, love how involved the Blumey Awards are and how truthfully they care about each and every one of their nominees and their actors and actresses. I see all of the other regional award programs and I hear about the other experiences and I just know that my experience then, and my experience to this day, I still feel so loved and supported by them and I will never forget them.